If you haven’t already, wander over to the LBC blog to check out our newest “Read This” selection. Personally, it’s my favorite out of all the books I’ve read for the Litblog Co-op. The book is called Television and it was written by Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Jordan Stump.
The LBC wants you to “Read This”
R is for Ridiculous
In a List at McSweeney’s, Chris Steck ponders what might happen when Sue Grafton runs out of letters for her series of novels (she’s up to S is for Silence, so letters are running short). Steck posits that F1 Is for Help might be a good option. He’s got some other ideas too.James Patterson was much smarter to go with his number-based series. Infinite possibilities there, literally. Though I should note that as of this writing, Patterson’s latest at Amazon is listed as The 6th Nanny even though the accompanying book cover shows the title as The 6th Target. That’s a lot of nannies, sure, but it doesn’t seem to point to quite gripping enough a premise for his fans.(via)Update: Fun’s over. Amazon has fixed the title of Patterson’s book.
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The Smithy Code
Can you handle another Da Vinci Code story? It has just emerged that Justice Peter Smith, who presided over the Dan Brown plagiarism trial, embedded a secret code within his ruling that refers to both The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, whose authors sued Brown. In the first 13 and a half pages of the 71-page ruling, a handful of italicized, boldfaced letters are embedded, that when combined, spell out “Smithy Code.” But there’s more. A further jumble of italicized, boldfaced letters have yet to be deciphered. In her New York Times piece, Sarah Lyall describes a series of “brief and ultimately frustrating e-mail messages” in which she tried to pry the solution from Smith, to no avail. She also relates Smith’s dismay when, for the first couple of weeks after the ruling was released, no one noticed the secrets that lay within: It has been nearly three weeks since he handed down the ruling. Probably disappointingly for Justice Smith, nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about it when it was first released. But he alluded to the possibility that there was something more soon afterward as a throwaway line in an e-mail exchange with a reporter for The New York Times, saying, “Did you find the coded message in the judgment?”It’s silly, but I admire Justice Smith for his cleverness. After all, a blogger can’t exactly look down on someone for grasping at his 15 minutes of fame.Update: From the comments, a mysterious anonymous commenter has provided us with the code. It starts out “smithy code” and from there, the jumble of letters is “Jaeiextostgpsacgreamqwfkadpmqzv”.Anybody want to take a stab at it?Update 2: Judge Smith has released some clues.Holy Blood, Holy Grail refers to the Dossiers Secret and the hidden message. It is revealed by spotting that certain random letters appear to be different in form from the majority of the text.Applying that to the judgment reveals the following highlighted letters: SMITHYCODEJAEIEXTOSTGPSACGREAMQWFKADPMQZVZ (the first part reveals there is a message)There is no significance to the placing of the letters in the text.Da Vinci Code also uses codes. The most liked one is apparently a numerical one (p.255 The Fibonacci Sequence). In the book it is changed.The correct sequence up to 21 is: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21The code is created by letter substitution.The letter change is creating by applying the Fibonacci Sequence numbers above letter by letter.The relevant number shows where you start for each letter to substitute. Thus the first letter is identified by rewriting the alphabet stating at the first letter in the alphabet ie for the first letter A A. The second letter is also started at 1; the third at 3. When 21 is reached the code reverts back to 1 etc and repeats that until all the letters are substituted. A message ought then be revealed (there is a deliberate typo to create further confusion). The message reveals a significant but now overlooked event that occurred virtually 100 years to the day of the start of the trial.The preparation of the Code took about 40 minutes and its insertion another 40 minutes or so.I hate crosswords and do not do Sudoku as I do not have the patience.Update 3: The Smithy Code has been cracked.
Three Pt. 1
A little more than 10 years ago a couple of Wall Street Journal reporters got together to write about the calamitous rise and fall of RJR Nabisco, an episode that would epitomize the back room shenanigans of a decade of junk bonds and hostile takeovers. They ended up with fantastic book called Barbarians at the Gate, which was later made into a decent HBO movie of the same title. The book is a thrilling account of cutthroat billion dollar deals, and gross misappropriation of funds, like when the CEO has the company plane pick up his dog to keep him company at a golf tournament. Now, after barely a pause it seems, there are again dozens of stories of greed to be told, starting of course with the biggest one of all, Enron. Once again two Wall Street Journal reporters have used their singular knowledge and access to tell the story of the bust that has come to define the boom that preceded it. Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller are the reporters who originally broke the story, and their book 24 Days, is as much about the collapse of Enron as it is about the investigative journalism that uncovered this massive fraud.On the way to work I caught the tail end of an interview with Richard Polsky. He was talking about how tremendously juvenile the world of high end modern art collectors, gallery owners, and artists can be. He was illustrating the point with a story about how a food fight erupted at a gallery, and an extremely expensive Ed Ruscha painting was marred by a grease stain from a thrown chicken wing. He describes this and the many other antics he encountered on his quest to purchase his first piece of modern art in his book I Bought Andy Warhol, which is, from everything I’ve heard, a tremendously funny jab at the inner circle of modern art.I read Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware about two months ago, and it continues to infect my brain as few other books have. Reading the book felt like a view into the psyche of writer and artist and character, a comic more real than a dream yet somehow just slightly less real than life. I was delighted to see that Chronicle Books that will allow me to further delve into the world of Jimmy Corrigan. Acme Novelty Datebook is the collected sketches of Ware from when he was writing Jimmy Corrigan. There are many things packed onto the pages: sketches for Jimmy Corrigan, great little sight gags and five or six panel comics that lead into a pleasant oblivion, and a lot of stuff that seemingly comes from nowhere and leads to nowhere, but is fascinating to look at. The book is beautiful. I can’t wait to spend more time with it.Three Pt. 2 (Advice for Those Abroad)My buddy Cem is trying to figure out what to do next. He’s currently in northwestern Thailand near the border with Burma. Help me help him decide what to do. Here are his three options:1. Stay in town and teach English to Burmese Refugees. Commitment: 2 months2. Move to the border town of Mae Sot and work with 10 young guys who live in a shack in the woods and produce an anti government magazine that they circulate in the refugee camps, internationally, and in Burma. Also teach english to Shan and Wa and Karen exile youth part time. Commitment: 3 months3. Pack up and head into Burma itself for 3 weeks doing major research for a big article, also purchasegood to sell at home (laquerware, etc). Record everything in Arabic script. Work on article and get published via NY contacts. Leave for Cairo or the beach when I get back.(I’m leaning towards option three by the way)
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Exclusive First Look: Claire Cameron’s ‘The Last Neanderthal’
The Millions numbers many excellent novelists among its staff. Today we reveal the cover of staffer Claire Cameron’s upcoming novel, The Last Neanderthal.
Following Cameron’s first novel, The Bear, which was long-listed for the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Last Neanderthal is the story of two women separated by millennia, linked by forces that will transform them both. Find it in stores May 2017.
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Top Tens: Their Silliness, Their Allure
Longtime Millions reader Laurie sent in her reaction to all these “top ten” book lists that have been floating around in recent months, while also, of course, sharing her own:In the wake of the release of The Top Ten, [there is also a Web site] a collection of top ten books chosen by 125 British and American writers, the Washington Post is soliciting readers’ top ten picks.These exercises are fun, but I hope no one takes them seriously. The lists they receive (like mine) will lean toward American/British books, with a smattering of European titles, partly because American schools emphasize Western literature. Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber should be as well known as War and Peace, but most Americans have never heard of it. Even when we have read the non-Western classics, we tend to favor the familiar — my list included The Old Man & the Sea and To Kill A Mockingbird, but Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji and Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh are probably greater works.What do you want to bet, though, that like the Modern Library a few years ago, they get inundated with a lot of lists that include Battlefield Earth?!My top ten (not set in stone, except for Heart of Darkness):The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark TwainThe Old Man and the Sea – Ernest HemingwayHeart of Darkness – Joseph ConradPortrait of the Artist As a Young Man – James JoyceTo Kill A Mockingbird – Harper LeeDon Quixote – CervantesThe Iliad & The Odyssey – HomerThe Dream of the Red Chamber – Cao XueqinWar & Peace – Leo TolstoyOedipus the King – SophoclesThanks Laurie!
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