Over at Intentionally Entertaining, I’ve put up a review/editorial about the brilliant Italo Calvino‘s story Under the Jaguar Sun—once again warping the boundaries of what either blog is supposed to exist for. Food and art and books intersect at so many interesting junctions that it seems natural to me to always be talking about all [...]
I’d like to turn your attention for a moment to heavy metal music. Aside from a few friends and family, I’m unclear about who is out there reading this blog, but I’m now picturing monocles popping out of eyes and a needle scratching across Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations.* It’s supposed to be a book blog after all. [...]
Allow me to indulge my nerdiest impulses here for a moment, if you please… Drew McWeeny’s Nerd 2.0 columns have forcibly reminded me of what’s really special about all of the Star Wars films. I began reading these columns with a feeling bordering on disdain for the overt sentimentality on display. But Mr. McWeeny eventually [...]
I was going to let it pass without comment, but the knowledge has been nagging me, insistently, with a need to share. Yesterday marked the anniversary of the release, in December of 1979, of the greatest rock-n-roll album of all time: The Clash‘s London Calling. I’ve told this story before, but it’s my party and [...]
Time, once again, for an entirely subjective and somewhat erratic list of favourite reads—this one for the year 2010. This time, I’m trying a little experiment. I’m often uncomfortable with hawking stuff through this blog—an admittedly awkward trait for someone attempting, in some fashion, to be a bookseller. But, just to see how it turns [...]
Matthew Cheney has posted some interesting thoughts on the ways in which people read. In particular, I liked this line a lot: “…we turn our ways of reading into prescriptions for reading: because I read this way, it is a meaningful and good way to read…” Although, to be honest, I think this statement is [...]
The excellent Bookride blog has posted a great little article on “The near and far future of the book“, which is a topic that gets no small amount of press in the age of Kindle and iPad—and is a near obsessive topic for booksellers. I think this article succinctly summarizes my own opinions: reading will occur more [...]
Slate has posted an interesting article by Paul Collins on perhaps the first how-to manual for writers. It should be no surprise to that Sherwin Cody’s How to Write Fiction was published in the Victorian Era. The Victorians wrote more—and more about themselves—than previous generations; thanks to advances in printing technology and the development of larger [...]
