“In the future, you’ll be so lightheaded”

Attention all readers who want to talk pretty one day: a story by David Sedaris has just been made into a film.

Year in Reading alumna Patricia Engel writes about the “real” Cuba she encountered in her research trips. Pair with Bill Morris’s Millions essay on Havana’s love for cars.

Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”

Congratulations to our very own Emily St. John Mandel, whose second novel, The Singer’s Gun, is included, along with 19 other books, in the 2010 Indie Next List Highlights. Jason Hafer of Wolfgang Books says:  “The Singer’s Gun is a taut, restrained book with a quick hook and a long pull. It is a moving and mysterious work, wholly authentic.”

“The University of Bologna in Italy has found what it says may be the oldest complete scroll of Judaism’s most important text, the Torah.”