This Bright River author Patrick Somerville visited the Lakemoor Gun Show with our own Emily St. John Mandel, and then wrote about the experience for GQ.
Two Tickets to the Gun Show. Literally.
A Bit of Advice
Recommended reading: Andrew Solomon draws from Rilke‘s Letters to a Young Poet and gives some advice for young writers. Pair with our own look at “the best advice writers ever received.“
Hedging Against Future Risk
Recommended Reading: This excerpt from Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow.
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The Mockingbird Lives
HarperCollins has announced that it will offer its trade paperback of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird at a discounted price to schools. This came as a response to the discontinuation of the mass-market paperback edition published by Hachette.
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Midweek Links
I thoroughly enjoyed the second installment of Emdashes’ Ask the New Yorker Librarians series.Michiko Kakutani hates Jonathan Franzen’s new memoir, The Discomfort Zone. Kakutani’s wrath filled pen aside, Ed explains why she’s right, and I have to agree. I looked back through the archives here and realized I hadn’t elaborated on it much beyond writing back in 2003 that “Franzen’s non-fiction bugs the heck out of me,” but it put me off enough that I avoided reading The Corrections for a long time because of it.Speaking of reviews, it’s a good thing Bob Dylan didn’t get the Franzen treatment. He tells contactmusic.com that while he doesn’t care about music reviews, the reviews for Chronicles Vol. 1 meant a lot to him: “Most people who write about music, they have no idea what if feels like to play it, but, with the book I wrote, I thought, ‘The people who are writing reviews of this book, man, they know what the hell they’re talking about. They know how to write a book, they know more about it than me.’ The reviews of this book, some of ’em almost made me cry – in a good way. I’d never felt that from a music critic, ever.”Even though it seems like there’s another “book banning” story in the news every week, the AP reports that the 405 challenges reported to the American Library Association last year is the smallest number since they started keeping track in the early 1980s. The challenges have dropped by more than half since the ALA started Banned Books Week to promote free expression. Kudos to the librarians.The second most brilliant magazine in the world (refer to the top item in this list for the first), The Economist has a characteristically well-considered a piece on the newspaper industry’s timid efforts to embrace the Internet. Thanks to Millions contributor Andrew for sending this along.