Crime Fiction Revivalists

At GalleyCat, Ron points to a New York Times story - coming four months after the fact - about how a mention of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman boosted book sales. You expect the Times to be a little more on top of things.In a similar "old news" vein, having followed the Google Book Search story pretty closely, I clicked over to Charles Arthur's story on the topic in the Guardian - which usually has pretty great book coverage - and was disappointed to find it to be a rehash of old news with a healthy dash of scaremongering about how Google could start printing on demand the books they've scanned and sell them to customers (oh, please!). Pretty weak stuff. I did however enjoy the story Arthur linked to, Victor Keegan's account of trying to get some of his writing published by a print on demand publisher, just to see how the process works.

After a long lazy summer living in a temporary arrangement (with my generous parents) in the Maryland suburbs, Mrs. Millions and I are picking up and moving again, this time to Philadelphia and this time (hopefully) we'll be there for a while.After spending our post-college years soaking it up in LA, we left for Chicago where I went to grad school. We found it considerably colder than Southern California, as you might expect, and the whole time we were there we felt halfway home, which makes sense considering that we're East Coasters by birth. While in Chicago, we discovered that it's hard to really settle in and get to know a place if you feel like you're just stopping over, even if that stopover is nearly two years long.But now we're moving Philadelphia with the idea that we could be there a while, "indefinitely," a word we're happy to be able to say after living out of boxes for months. We're excited about this move because it's situated nearly evenly between Washington, DC and New York, our two childhood homes, yet it is almost unknown to us. After a few visits there in the last few months to find an apartment, we've already taken a liking to the place. We're living near South Street in "Center City" as they call it. Though we've lived in cities before, we've never lived in a setting this urban, usually ending up in the grittier, cheaper outskirts of downtown areas. But Philly is small and compact, and we're a little tired of almost living in cities, so we'll be in the middle of it all, with dozens things to do just steps from our door.The fact remains, however, that despite our being thrilled about our new city, we know almost nothing about it, and we know only a couple of people who live there, so, with that in mind, I'd love some suggestions from current or former Philadelphians. I'd especially love to hear about the city's best bookstores and good books that are about or based in the city, but I'll happily take recommendations on restaurants, cultural venues, and any other "must see" stuff in Philly. Any ideas?

My travels to the East coast last weekend swept away any doubt about the importance of the current wave of bestselling books about the Bush administration. In airport lounges, on planes, and in the New York City subways people everywhere are getting their news, not from the Times or from the weekly newsmagazines, but from a handful of books by people who enjoyed unfettered access to the current administration. I especially noticed an abundance of copies of Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack as well as a handful of copies of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, (which, at the moment, come in at number one and number six respectively on Amazon's Top 100). The content of these books is interesting, but so is the phenomenon behind them. According to many who have been following this trend, we are in uncharted territory. In the Times, David K. Kirkpatrick explains why all of this is unprecedented and suggests that the administration's vigilance over the information that ends up in newspapers and magazines has caused a spillover into books. Here is the article.