The ever-irreverent Woody Allen weighs in on his all-time faves, among other things. A Catcher in the Rye unsurprisingly makes the list, as do more obscure picks like The World of SJ Perelman.
Woody Allen’s Favorite Books
A subject “simply too controversial for the university”
As noted on Arts & Letters Daily, Yale’s decision to shutter its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism raises the question, “Where does scholarship end and advocacy begin?”
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Den Father
By now the overlap between writers and drug addicts is pretty well-known, but it wasn’t so well-known back when Thomas De Quincey wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In the essay, De Quincey admitted that not only was he addicted to opium, he suspected he’d ingested more of the substance than any other man save Coleridge. (Incidentally, we reviewed a novel by Year in Reading alumnus Jeet Thayil that largely took place in an opium den.)
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Jack Kerouac’s Journals
It’s hard to resist reading others’ diary entries, especially when the diaries in question belong to famous writers. Now that a selection of Jack Kerouac‘s journals is being released from The New Yorker archives and made available online, resistance is more or less futile. Originally published in 1998, these journal entries span the years from 1948 to 1950, from just after the long drive that inspired On the Road to the publication of Kerouac’s first book, The Town and the City.
Monday Links
The New Yorker lovefest continues: Emdashes is compiling a list of the New Yorker articles that have appeared in Houghton Mifflin’s annual Best American Essays series. It’s a perfect guide for dipping into your Complete New Yorker set. Update: Emdashes has also done a “short stories” version of the list.My cousin Mitch produces a survey of state quarters. Arkansas: thumbs down. Connecticut: thumbs up!The Regret the Error blog (which tracks all sorts of funny newspaper corrections) has produced a book with a serious sounding subtitle.I would love to get my hands on Transit Maps of the World, an encyclopedic book that’s already been noted by Boing Boing and kottke.
Madame Bovary Trailer Released
Just released: a trailer for an upcoming film adaptation of Madame Bovary starring Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre?). Pair with our review of Lydia Davis‘s 2010 translation of Flaubert‘s classic.
Dear Diary
Craig Brown recommends five published diaries for your reading pleasure.
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Literary Resolutions
The new year is, of course, a time for resolutions, and Electric Literature has collected literary resolutions from Alexander Chee, Year in Reading alum Emily Gould, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, and many more. Coming out of the hectic holiday season, Jonathan Lee‘s resolution seems particularly apt: “My literary new year’s resolution is to read slower. I want to try and re-discover the kind of reading where you savor every page instead of thinking about unread emails, progress through the book, progress through the to-be-read pile, and the quantity of remaining tea bags in cupboard.”