Read, Read, Read

“The voices you hear when you sit down to write lead you to believe that you’re a character in the novel you’re writing even though metafiction hasn’t been invented yet.” If this applies to you, you might be in a Muriel Spark novel according to Maud Newton’s article at The Toast. We aren’t surprised that Newton wrote this because Spark made her 2010 Year in Reading post.

Remember, everybody. Running with the Olympic torch is temporary, but a misspelled tattoo is forever.

Whether they’re “coordinat[ing] kamikaze attacks on the power grid,” “damaging [a nuclear missile] base’s physical infrastructure,” or even just water-skiing, I feel that it must be said unequivocally: I for one welcome our new squirrel overlords.

As John Steinbeck’s classic Travels With Charley nears the half-century mark, a writer has retraced the author’s cross-country journey and come to the conclusion that the resulting book was full of inaccuracies and outright fabrications. The journalist Bill Steigerwald, whose article appears in the current issue of the libertarian quarterly Reason, says he didn’t set out to trash the Nobel laureate. “As a libertarian, I kind of liked the old guy,” Steigerwald tells the New York Times. “He liked guns; he liked property rights.”

Recommended Reading: Anna Wiener on Speedboat by Renata Adler. Adler’s book, which David Shields recommended on our site two years ago, will be reissued by NYRB Classics in March, 2013.