“Like reading, love works in roughly the same way every time, but the details of any given case are irreducibly particular, and it’s in the details that everything happens.” Lidija Haas on Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot. (You could also read our review by Virginia Marshall.)
Boiled Down
Review of Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”
Charles McGrath at The New York Times reviews Per Petterson’s new novel I Curse the River of Time: “...at moments when a lot of American prose seems fizzy and over-rich, the sentences in I Curse the River of Time go down like an eye-watering shot of aquavit.”
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Rote She Wrote
At The NYT Mag, Virginia Heffernan's "Drill, Baby, Drill" explores the possibility that drills and memorization might not be quite as oppressive as some of the kinder, gentler pedagogues of our time suggest and offers a list of aps to help aspiring rote learners (Nota Bene: VerseByHeart).
Everyone Gets a Badge
Over at the Observer, Brent Underwood writes on how he self-published a fake book on Amazon. He sold a total of three copies, enough for him to earn the #1 Best Seller badge in several categories. Now his fake book has landed an actual book deal and is available in paperback.
Moldy Links
The book bloggers are all waiting for the announcement of the National Book Award winner, and I, too, have to wonder what will happen once we know the recipient of the award in the fiction category. These women have gotten a lot of grief from folks who think they shouldn't be there. What I'm wondering is will the NY Times and all the rest end their crusade and graciously accept the winner, or will the winner, whoever she may be, have to bear more criticism on her own. We shall see. In the meantime I have dug up some old links that are, unlike all this NBA stuff, not very timely, but they are good, so I wanted to share them with you:First, take a look at Jonathan Yardley's fantastic discussion of the American novels that are, to his mind, the best of the last 125 years. He calls it "State of the Art."The discussion among my fellow book bloggers about the Paris Reviews magnificent decision to put all of their interviews online has got me thinking about the recently departed George Plimpton, which is why I was happy to find this wonderful interview that he conducted with Truman Capote about In Cold BloodFinally, there are two types of people in this world... well, not really, but in this post from earlier this year, Michael at 2Blowhards explains the difference between movie people and book people and a lively discussion follows.Well, that's enough from the old bookmarks file. Expect more timely news sometime soon.
Basketball, Poetry, and the Union of the Two
Inua Ellams wrote a poem entitled “Portrait of Prometheus as a Basketball Player” in which he imagined “the fire stolen from the gods to be shaped as a basketball, and Prometheus dunking light into the world.” [Note: Ctrl + F for “Portrait of Prometheus” at this link to read the poem.] Over at Magma, Ellams discusses “the process of composing a poem, as a coach might stitch a [basketball] team together.” Perhaps all of this explains Patricia Lockwood’s interest in Shaquille O’Neal?
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Hodgman on the Apocalypse
Humorist, author, and sometime PC representative John Hodgman is interviewed for The A.V. Club. Among the discussion points? Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
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