If you thought Bill Gates was content donating millions of dollars to charities around the world and hiding out in his exorbitantly expensive mansion compound, think again! The Microsoft founder and tech mogul reviews books on his personal blog, Gates Notes–and those reviews actually drive sales. Move over “Colbert Bump,” the Gates Bump is here to stay.
Billionaire Book Critic
A Good Character Is Hard To Find
I’ve told you about The Atlantic’s By Heart series plenty of times before. This week brings us novelist Paul Lisicky taking a close look at how Flannery O’Connor’s “flawed” characters are the ones we find ourselves drawn to most.
The Magnificent
“In a concession to our unsubtle political age, the cliff is doing a good impression of Abraham Lincoln in profile with a vicious orange fulmination exploding from his head.” Looks like Wells Tower had an interesting time in Hawaii.
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J.M. Coetzee on Philip Roth
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An Irish Take on the NYC Grid
New York City’s municipal grid turns 200 this year. To commemorate, author and Year in Reading alumna Belinda McKeon notes the way New Yorkers utilize it as they “don’t wander so much as dart” from place to place.
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“On Stage as On Paper”
There’s just something about David Foster Wallace‘s writing that makes people want to adapt it. We’ve written about this phenomenon before – there have been Infinite Jest-inspired radio tributes and music videos, series of illustrations, even a novel-in-legos. Interest in adapting Wallace’s work doesn’t seem to be slowing, and earlier this month Public Theatre put on an experimental performance of passages of his writing and interviews, A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, which both Salon and Hyperallergic reviewed.
Novelcraft
“I war-gamed out everything. My biggest fear was that somebody tries to play out my book and finds out it won’t work.” At The New York Times, Alexandra Alter writes about the new Minecraft novel by Max Brooks, author of World War Z: “In the process, he may have also created a strange new entertainment category, one that hovers somewhere between fan fiction, role-playing games and literature — a novel set in a game, that can itself be played within the game.” And while we’re on the topic of games, let’s also talk about geekdom and race.
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“Years passed.”
Recommended Reading: “So I Went Away” by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan.
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He Even Chose His Own Ending, In A Way
Some folks were abuzz this week about the release of all 47 endings to Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms. That kind of commitment to a single story is impressive, and illustrates the author’s dedication to his work, but as Andrew O’Hagan points out in the London Review of Books, Big Papa loved no story so much as his own.
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