Bookdwarf

Massachusetts, that is. Yes, because I like him so much, we’re getting Rupert Thomson for an event sometime this coming August. I’m ecstatic. I haven’t read his new book Death of a Murderer yet, but a copy is winging its way to me right now. This is the perfect way to end a work week, [...]

George Tenet’s new book At the Center of the Storm, which blasts the Bush administration and in particular Cheney for pushing us into the war, supposedly goes on sale Monday April 30th. Yet somehow The New York Times managed to legally get their hands on one. “A copy of the book was purchased at retail [...]

I finished To the Lighthouse last week in time for class. It was delightful! I’m feeling sort of obsessed now. I’m going to read Mrs. Dalloway next and possibly tackle Hermione Lee’s biography of Woolf. She seems like such a fascinating woman. As for George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I had stated that I think it’s one [...]

Have you ever read a book that while not the greatest book in the world filled the need for the moment? I suppose in essence I’m talking about escapist reading. Usually about this time of year, I begin longing to run away and travel somewhere. Sometimes I’ll read travel writing to sate this need. Or [...]

Garth over at The Millions conducts a walking tour of NYC independent bookstores. He argues that the independents provide an experience that the corporates can’t reproduce (hear hear!). Perhaps I should put together something similar for Boston….

I might have spent the better part of last weekend watching the Red Sox sweep the Yankees, but I also did some reading. I read Elizabeth Hand’s amazing new mystery Generation Loss and immediately wrote a staff recommendation for the store. Here’s what I wrote: Do you want to read a smart, dark, literary thriller [...]

Dang, I wish I was in New York for the week as the PEN World Voices festival kicks off. It starts tonight at Cooper Union with a discussion called Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment. Speakers will include Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Geert Mak, Marilynne Robinson, Roxana Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Gary [...]

Today kicks off Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die week over at the LBC. This is a great book by Mark Binelli about a slapstick comedy team. We’re having all kinds of fun stuff this week, so head on over.

I admit it. I’ve never read any Virginia Woolf up until now. Professor Damrosch, who teaches my Major British Writers class that I am taking at Harvard, has put To the Lighthouse on the syllabus for tomorrow’s class, so I’m reading Woolf for the first time finally. I think I’ve always been a bit scared [...]

I have the antidote to a very rainy and chilly Tuesday—-Free cone day at Ben & Jerry’s. It’s today only from 12 to 8. Conveniently for me, there is one just a few blocks away.

Fiction: The Road by Cormac McCarthy General Non-Fiction: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright Biography: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher by Debby Applegate History: The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff Poetry: Native Guard [...]

The LitBlog Coop announces its spring 2007 Read This! pick today: Alan DeNiro’s debut short story collection, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. Carolyn, the nominator, has a nice post about why she picked this book. I really liked this book when I read it last summer, so I was pleased to see [...]

Normally I don’t dance around my office at the end of the week, but this week has seemed quite long. Perhaps it’s the New England weather. We can never have a normal Spring. No, we have to have warm, then cold, then wet, then Nor’easters. It can be maddening. I got my bike out a [...]

Yes, another redesign. I wanted something a bit more bookish. What do you think? How does the blue work?

No wait, that should read The Millions Interviewed. C. Max Magee, creator of The Millions has been interviewed by the literary community at LitMinds. In today’s post about Vonnegut, he admits that he once used to be a completist, that if he found a book he liked, he would read that author’s entire canon. I [...]

As has been widely reported, Kurt Vonnegut died last night in Manhattan. Ed has a comprehensive list of links to interviews, reviews, etc.

Thanks to Bookslut for this link to a post by a woman who fainted the other day while reading Chuck Palaniuk’s short story “Guts” in his story collection Haunted. Man, if only I had the power to make you puke….

I’ve started a list of all the books I’ve read so far this year. You can see it at the top of the left column on this page. I read a lot more than I mention here. I find that I’m often not moved enough to write anything about a book whether it’s good or [...]

There’s lots of buzz surrounding the publication of Robert Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. There are lengthy articles in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Bookforum. I haven’t had a chance yet to read any Bolano, but I’m looking forward to it. It would be nice to see people embracing more literature in translation. Has [...]