Although we’ll never get the chance to read Walter White’s memoir, we’ll get the next best thing. Bryan Cranston is writing a memoir due out next year. “With this book, I want to tell the stories of my life and reveal the secrets and lies that I lived with for six years shooting Breaking Bad,” he said. While you wait, grab a book from our Breaking Bad reading list.
Heisenberg’s Memoirs
Keeping Present the Forgotten
Recommended reading: The Believer interviews Claudia Rankine about Citizen: An American Lyric, the relationship between art and literature and the importance of “keeping present the forgotten bodies.”
“Strongly Worded”
After learning that the good folks at BAM will be roasting Gary Shteyngart, the author’s inquisitive dachshund, Felix, wrote a plaintive letter to the organizers. It’s worth pointing out here that we set up Felix on a doggy blind date a few weeks ago.
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On Social Novels
“What if, instead of simply critiquing Go Set a Watchman’s failure, we tried to analyze it? The new, older work makes more sense if we read it as an attempt to accomplish two tasks: first, to master—unsuccessfully, it turns out—the smart-magazine style that Harper Lee developed in her student journalism; and second, to write in a genre that often relied on the ironic elisions typical of ‘smart style’: the midcentury social-problem novel.” Tom Perrin on Harper Lee and the social novel. Pair with Michael Bourne’s Millions review.
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Keeping Tabs
The F.B.I. had a massive file on James Baldwin in the fifties and sixties. Among other things, their notes featured passages of surprisingly adept criticism, including an oddly in-depth look at sexuality in his work. You could also read Justin Campbell on race, fatherhood and Baldwin’s fiction.
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And on and on and on.
Carl Wilson, author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the end of Taste (a book length study of Celine Dion‘s megablockbusting album of the same name), revisits the enduring and sort of nauseating classic from Titanic‘s soundtrack in The Atlantic.
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Listening to Joyce
We’ve written before about various rare recordings of authors reading that occasionally surface on the internet (a sample here) but today we add a new author: James Joyce. Open Culture has posted two recordings of the author reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and while the audio quality is exactly what you would expect for recordings made in the 1920s, we still recommend listening.
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Bad Titles
“There’s something to be said for allusive titles: they can be intriguing and draw you in. And obscure titles at least make a change from the current trend for The Woman Who Climbed out of Her Car and Mowed the Lawn. (I made that one up, though it could be a bestseller). But when it comes to titles that are simply misleading, there are just far, far too many.” In a piece for the Guardian Moira Remond considers some of the most misleading and misunderstood book titles, such as John Williams‘s Stoner (which our own Claire Cameron wrote about here.)