Banned Books Week

As I mentioned yesterday, it's Banned Books Week. It's a time to remember the books that have been challenged, censored, burned or otherwise restricted from the public view. It's also a time to celebrate intellectual freedom in general, and to ruminate on what a precious and sometimes difficult thing that is.

I thought David Ulin's piece in yesterday's Los Angeles Times was very well-put. As he says:

Yet it's foolish, self-defeating even, to pretend that books are innocuous, that we don't need to concern ourselves with what they say. If that's the case, then it doesn't really matter if we ban them, because we have already stripped them of their power.

Books do change things: Just think of "Common Sense," which lighted the fuse of the American Revolution, or "Mein Kampf," which laid out the blueprint for Hitler's Germany.

These are very different books -- one a work of hope and human decency, the other as venal a piece of writing as I've ever read -- but what they have in common is a kind of historical imperative, the sense that, at the right place and time, a book can be a galvanizing factor, for good or ill.

"Mein Kampf" is a title you don't hear a lot during Banned Books Week; the focus is more on classics such as "Song of Solomon" or "The Catcher in the Rye" that have been challenged in libraries and schools.

As I pass our Banned Books display every day at work, I find myself thinking about disagreement -- in some cases with the ideas in the book, in others with the people who want to ban them. This is the season for disagreement. We've already had one presidential debate and this week will feature the vice presidential candidates in active verbal dispute. I think this is what we ought to be celebrating during banned books week -- the right to disagree, and the difficult, often begrudging acceptance that those we disagree with deserve a platform as well.

Freedom of ideas means just that and not, conversely, freedom from ideas. I can understand the impulse to keep uncomfortable, dangerous ideas away, so that their contagion can't spread. I can also see that an idea misunderstood can be a dangerous thing. But to never hear the other side, to blot it out, is a dangerous thing as well. So maybe when you decide to read 1984 or The Turner Diaries or A Clockwork Orange or Mein Kampf or a book about gay animals getting married, when you read an author you disagree with (Ann Coulter, Al Franken, whomever) what you're supporting is the right to hear all sides, to disagree - vehemently, in some cases - but to allow the idea its place.


Reading only the books, magazines, and newspapers you agree with is an excellent way to calcify your thinking and turn into the kind of boring demagogue that nobody wants to be seated next to at a dinner party. Don't be this person. Rather than challenging a book, read something genuinely challenging, if only to confirm that it's wrong. How else can we really argue against something unless we fully understand it? Otherwise, Ulin is right, and Banned Books Week is merely a "toothless, feel-good spectacle that makes us less likely to consider the actual ramifications of free expression."

Catching Up with the Literary World

It is Banned Books Week, when we think about books that have been challenged, banned, burned, or otherwise kept from the reading public. I'll have more thoughts on banned books later in the week, but today, we need to catch up on the literary happenings around the internet:

• "My neighborhood was the first stop on the bus from New York. But every one of my friends acted like the neighborhood was some sort of weird, thuggish Brigadoon, and if they left, it would fucking disappear." Junot Diaz and Richard Price on New York City. (Via the Morning News)

• "Happiness is like, Americans always fetishize happiness and harp a lot about it. I don’t always understand what is meant by that. Russians never ask you, ‘Are you happy?’ Happiness isn’t a category as important for people with a Russian mentality. The pursuit of happiness is a uniquely American way of thinking..." Sana Krasikov, one of the 5 of 35, talking about why we read on Luke Ford's blog. (via Jacket Copy)

• Amanda Petrusich, author of It Still Moves, has a new website. She also blogs pretty frequently at pianoparty.blogspot.com.

• "Married to Joanne Woodward, his second wife, for 50 years this winter, Newman always looked at her like something he'd pulled out of a Christmas stocking. He looked at his daughters that way, too. It was like, all these years later, he couldn't quite believe he got to keep them." A fitting tribute to Paul Newman, the philanthropist on Slate.

• Chuck Klosterman's novel Downtown Owl is out. I briefly saw a galley of it earlier in the summer, but I let it get away. After reading this Salon piece, I regret that.

• Don DeLillo is blogging for the Onion. His blog is called Tiny Silver Death Machine. Of course.
  

Open Book: Jonathan Safran Foer

There maybe no more polarizing author writing today than Jonathan Safran Foer. His two novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, have both been NY Times Bestsellers and have been lauded by literary critics as daring and experimental. Foer's detractors have called him cloying, pretentious, and smug. Keith Gessen, editor of n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, recently called Everything Is Illuminated a "work of Jewish kitsch."

One gets the feeling that some of Foer's critics are responding to the enormous commercial success he's received at such a young age. He found an early champion in Joyce Carol Oates, got a reported half-million dollar advance for his first book, married the talented novelist Nicole Krauss, and bought a brownstone in a desirable neighborhood in Brooklyn.

This is all prelude to saying that Foer is the subject of Slate's second Open Book episode, which is up today:

John Krasinski Reads David Foster Wallace

When John Krasinski got his check for doing the pilot of the American version of The Office, he didn't buy a car or an expensive rug or a share in a championship racehorse (although he was probably tempted), he optioned the David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which he's adapted for the screen, directed, and produced. Back in 2006, he made an appearance at Jest Fest, an evening of readings of Wallace's work. Here is the YouTube footage of Krasinski reading from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Warning: The content is for mature audiences only, and is probably NSFW, depending on where you W):



I've never read Wallace's work. It's something I had planned to rectifiy this fall with an Infinite Jest reading group, but now, support seems to be waning. There's something sad about picking up Wallace's opus now, when before it seemed merely daunting. His death hasn't hurt his sales, so maybe I'm the only one who feels this way. Anyway, what's interesting to me about the Krasinski footage is how he makes the passage come alive. The knock against DFW's writing has always been its difficulty, and yet here's a passage that has the audience in stitches. It's easy to follow, it's funny, hell, it's brilliant.

Cover Art: The Contest

Creativity Magazine & Penguin have launched a contest to find the next great book cover. They asked designers, photographers, and other artistic types to design a cover for Sam Taylor's new book The Island at the End of the World, about a near-future where much of the world is covered in water as the result of catastrophic flooding. The 25 finalists have been posted here. It's a pretty fascinating grouping, and it shows the many different directions that one concept can push people. There are covers that are quite literal (one has a tiny island atop big blue globe) while others make prominent use of text. There's one that - for whatever reason - reminds me of the paperback cover of Arthur Bradford's story collection Dogwalker.

My favorite is #17, which was designed by Matt Taylor.


He chose to go in a very different direction, and I enjoyed reading his explanation of how he got to this design. The cover seems to me to have the effect of funneling the browser's attention down to the title, providing a sense of chaos, energy, and movement, as well as suggesting the internal tensions of the book. Which is your favorite? (Via Galleycat, who always turns up great stuff.)

Some Awards, Some Video Entertainment, and My Youth: Just Wednesday's Links'

There's a lot happening in the world of literature today, and you've got a right to hear about all of it.

• The National Book Foundation has announced its 5 Under 35 Fiction selections for 2008. The winners are Nam Le, Sana Krasikov, Keith Gessen, Fiona Maazel, and Matthew Eck. I've had drunken conversations with both Le and Krasikov, and I had a sober conversation with Gessen when he was here for his event in April. Congratulations to all of them.

• I found this video of David Henry Sterry explaining how to get an agent pretty funny (courtesy of Galleycat): David Henry Sterry will be leading an event similar to this one ("The Art of the Memoir") at Vroman's on Friday, October 3. Panelists will include the very funny Chelsea Handler, author of Are You There Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea.

• It's National Punctuation Day. Celebrate accordingly. I like to use dashes myself. How about you?
  

• For some reason, I find myself thinking about Buster Olney's Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty today. Hmm, why could that be?

• A New York Times Magazine profile of Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap, where Dylan Thomas, Saul Bellow, Milton Friedman, and I all used to drink (though, admittedly, not together).
  

Bring the Links, They All Screamed!

In honor of Tuesday, the greatest day ever:

• Banned Books Week is next week. Get your burning bookmark. (via Boing Boing)

• The McArthur Foundation Genius grants have been awarded. Bookish types Alex Ross and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie each received one of the $500,000 fellowships. And hats off to the MacArthur Foundation for honoring urban farmer Will Allen for "transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations."
  

• Alan Moore won't be watching the film version of Watchmen when it comes out. "It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Can't we get something else? Perhaps some takeout? Even Chinese worms would be a nice change."

Vroman's Podcast 5: Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga is the author of The White Tiger, a gripping new novel about contemporary India. It has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, one of two debut novels to make the list this year. I've already made it clear that I'm pulling for him.

Mr. Adiga and I spoke over the phone a short while ago. He was in his apartment in Mumbai, and I was in my kitchen. It was early in the morning for me, which might explain why I inverted the name of a key character in the book. During our conversation, which runs about 21 minutes, we spoke about globalization, outsourcing, book sales, and how the United States is already dead to the rest of the world. You know, the usual stuff.

Click here to download the podcast to your computer.

Links Blowing Up

It is usually my policy not to post anything else on a day when I put up a new podcast (which you should really, absolutely listen to), but there is so much book-related news to talk about today, I feel compelled to compile a list of links:

• It's tough times out there, but Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, known in the blogosphere as author of The Written Nerd, is opening a bookstore in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn. During the recent Brooklyn Book Fair, the neighborhood threw her a party, and the New York Times reported on it.

• Oprah has reached down from the heavens and bestowed untold wealth and fame upon David Wroblewski, author of her newest book club pick, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

• The serial is making a comeback. First Playboy published Denis Johnson's latest work Nobody Move in serial form, and now Alexander McCall Smith is serializing his latest novel, "Corduroy Mansions."

• And finally, the 10 Books Not to Read Before You Die. "5: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson. Dreary ramblings of an unreliable and workshy tosspot. Its sole distinction consists in the creation of ‘Gonzo journalism’, which made it OK for journalists, particularly rock journalists, to get shit-faced with whoever they happened to be writing about."

Two Dollar Radio: "The Publishing Industry Isn't Dying"

One of the best parts about attending BEA this year was meeting Eric Obenauf and Eliza Jane Wood, the couple who run Two Dollar Radio, one of the best small presses operating today. Galleycat has posted a video interview with the Two Dollar Radio folks, taped at the launch party for Frances Levy's book Erotomania, in which they answer the charge that the publishing industry is just the music industry, version 2.o (or something like that).



For the record, this has always been my take on the differences between books and music or film: If one looks at the history of recorded music, from the first phonographs through vinyl LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and now mp3 and other digital forms, one can see that each technology had its limitations. Some of them represented a jump forward, and some (cassettes, I'm looking at you!) didn't. The point I'm making here is that recorded music has changed its primary delivery method at least five times in the last 120 years. Why? None of the technologies for delivering it were perfect, or near-perfect enough to resist innovation.

Film has a shorter life in terms of home use by consumers. First there were private theaters - obviously the domain of the super rich only - then came TVs, which would show the occasional movie, then the VCR, then DVDs and fine-point refinements of that technology, and now online delivery of feature length films via streaming video. One can track the evolution from projected images, to VCR, to DVD, to streaming video, but the point is the same: the relatively young artform of motion pictures has changed its delivery method, especially for the home audience, a number of times. Again, none of the previous technologies was adecquate for consumer needs, so innovation was inevitable.

Now lets think about books. Books have more or less remained the same for 550 years. What does this tell me? It tells me that the book is a durable technology, and one that's difficult to improve upon. The contents of a book aren't vulnerable the way the information on a CD is (while one can tear or burn a book, it's much easier to render a CD unplayable than it is a book unreadable (although Lauren Conrad's going to give it a shot . Hey-oh!)). The fidelity of the information doesn't detiriorate with each usage, as is the case with a video tape or a cassette. Books are relatively portable, they last generations, and they are exceedingly easy to use. In short, they aren't going anywhere, no matter what Amazon, Sony, or any other digital beheomoth might say.

This isn't to say that the publishing industry doesn't need to make some changes. Most people would agree that there are simply too many books published to adequately market them, and too often good books get lost in the shuffle. And yes, it is a little ridiculous that an entire industry's hopes seem to be attached to one or two products (Where's the next Harry Potter? The next Da Vinci Code?) But there are publishing houses, like Two Dollar Radio and Akashic and Soft Skull Press and Greywolf any number of other great houses, that seem to be able to get it right. So can we stop with the end of publishing already?

Let's talk about the impeding death of magazines, because those seem doomed to me. I can easily see getting everything that I used to get from Esquire from some sort of online location, downloading it, along with GQ, the New York Times, the LA Times (if they build up their book coverage a bit), and all my blogs, onto a reader of some sort, and reading them on my way to work or on a flight. That could work. I throw out magazines when I'm done with them, don't you? Do you similarly throw out books? Anyway, this is just my two cents, and I'd love to hear reader reactions to the notion that publishing books is a dying business.

Literature for the New Depression

Yeah, I know, the economy is fundamentally sound. And only the doom-and-gloomers among us are publicly declaring this to be even a recession, let alone the dreaded "D" word, but it still can't hurt to be prepared, right? So here are a few books to enjoy by candle light (after your power's been shut off) or by the fire in your hobo camp:

• The Grapes of Wrath. Duh. (By the way, we're having a reading circle event hosted by our fabulous buyer Sherri tomorrow night. Come talk about the Dust Bowl and California and banning books.)
• How to Cook a Wolf. MFK Fisher is the godmother of foodie literature, and this is her classic treatise on cooking during wartime shortages. It should still work during the depression, too. And imagine how easy it will be to cook that wolf after you've shot it from an airplane.
• The Worst Hard Time. Timothy Egan won the 2006 National Book Award for this history of the Dust Bowl years.
• Don't Throw It Out and Homemade. In the new economy, you'll have no money to buy anything new. These two books will help you make your own everything - from cleaning products to pet food to lotion - and reuse the stuff you've already got. This is one of the hidden benefits of complete economic apocalypse: Not an environmentalist before? You are one now.
• The 99¢ Only Stores Cookbook. This is your Whole Foods now.
• Apocalypse How: Turning the End of Times into the Best of Times. This book contains handy "to-hoard" lists, a guide to dating if you discover you are the last man on earth, and much more.

Now you have something to do while waiting in the breadline or recovering from a recent rock fight with the roving gangs of looters.

Make with the Funny Already

With everybody in the literary world understandably feeling a little down, I salute Paper Cuts for posting about the funniest novel ever written. It isn't often that I'm so in line with the zeitgeist, but I happen to agree with those responding to the call for nominations -- Lucky Jim is the funniest novel ever written. Other funny novels are:

• Home Land, by Sam Lipsyte ("Wakie wakie, eggs and bakie.") Also funny: The Subject Steve.
  

• Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore (There were no books by women on the Paper Cuts list (and the blogger David Kelly points this out). This is a big problem. People really don't like to think of women as funny. That's messed up. Anna Farris. Funny.)

• Wheat That Springeth Green, by JF Powers

• The End of Vandalism, by Tom Drury

• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

• The Information, by Martin Amis (The "He was impotent..." passage is what I'm thinking of here.)
  

• The Mystery Guest, by Gregoire Bouillier (If this is even a novel. Who knows? Who cares? 'Tis funny, I say.)
  

I laughed a whole bunch of times at Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, but I thought it was so sad that I don't think of it as a comedy. It is, I suppose, and so it should go on the list. Of course, if one were to open the question beyond just novels, there'd be many more very strong contenders, including memoirs like How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Please Excuse My Daughter, and Rock On, essays by David Sedaris, Chuck Klosterman, Sarah Vowell, and David Rakoff, and short stories by people like Arthur Bradford, George Saunders, and of course, more Lorrie Moore.

So what novels get you laughing?

David Foster Wallace is Dead at 46

Others have said it better than I. This is a tragedy.

Weekend Links (Not the Golf Kind)

Something for the weekend, something for the soul, something for you:

• How do you choose what book to read? "Is the book published by a company that you’ve never heard of — or, far worse, does that company appear to share the last name of the author or his yacht?"

• Sana Krasikov, author of the new story collection One More Year, writes about reading Andre Dubus in Iowa at The Millions.

• James Marcus interviews Philip Roth in the Los Angeles Times.

• Slate is running excerpts of State by State, a new book featuring essays on all 50 states. Vroman's will be hosting a screening of Powell's Out of the Book film of State by State on Friday, October 10.

Sleep late tomorrow. You deserve it.

Two Worlds Colliding

When I took this job, I promised myself I wouldn't write about "The Hills," which is, in my humble opinion, the single most fascinating show on television (Obviously, it didn't work, since I already have a Hills tag on this blog). I don't want to get too far into my theories on the show because, well, it's Friday, and I do actually have a bit of work to do today. I will mention that you can read my treatise on "The Hills" by purchasing a copy of the current issue of Barrelhouse Magazine here. Trust me, there are far better things in the magazine than my essay, but it is in there, and I've heard it's worth a read. (For a sort of Cliff Notes version of the thesis (you lazy bastards) check it out here. But really, you should buy the magazine. It's butt-kicking, much like the Barrelhouse Blog, which doesn't truck with no jibber jabber.)

But today I have a legitimate reason to mention "The Hills" on this blog. Lauren Conrad, the star of the show, has inked a three book deal with Harper Collins. She will write a three book series about a girl who moves to LA and stars in a reality television show. Much is made about whether "The Hills" is "real" or staged, with many viewers pulling their hair out over the issue (But they're missing the point!). How fitting that Lauren's books will be fictional memoir, the genre of the future.

Guest Post from David Fuller, Author of Sweetsmoke

David Fuller is the author of the novel Sweetsmoke. He will be at Vroman's on Tuesday, September 16 at 7 pm. Set during the Civil War, Sweetsmoke is the story of Cassius Howard, a carpenter and slave, who risks everything to uncover the truth behind the murder of a freed black woman, Emoline, a beloved soul who taught him to read and once saved him. Pat Conroy describes Sweet Smoke as “a fascinating and gripping novel about the Civil War…part mystery, part love story, and a harrowing portrait of slavery that reads with the immense power of the slave narratives.” Mr. Fuller writes about how he conceived of the novel and its main character, Cassius:

"Sweetsmoke has endured a long journey, with 8 years of research behind me before I started writing the novel. I am not a historian; I am a storyteller. The research I did was in support of that specific area of the country, Virginia, at that specific time, 1862. I set out to avoid the minefield of writing about the noble slave versus the evil planter. My research had told a trickier, more nuanced story. The peculiar institution of slavery was appalling, degrading and morally reprehensible. Within that reality, I learned about human beings and their foibles and their ironies, people who proved to be just as foolish, intelligent, kind, vicious, worthy and disgusting as any you might meet today. With Sweetsmoke, I wanted to show how all the people lived under the umbrella of slavery, to show how politics raged in the slave quarters as well as in the big house, to show how people created families not just among their own but across racial lines. The relationship at the heart of the novel is the strange, almost father-son, relationship between the white planter and master of Sweetsmoke Plantation, Hoke Howard, and his slave, Cassius.

After having written over 50 screenplays, I have never before written a character like Cassius. He was, and is, unique in my world. He was a man who lived in a time of complete oppression, yet he was definitively not a victim by personality. I have never been comfortable writing from the point of view of a victim. As Cassius was anything but a victim, I could write his story and relate to him. I could see his world through his eyes.

Please come by Vroman’s next Tuesday and say hello. I’d love to talk with you about these stories and others that concerned writing the novel."

--David Fuller

On The Literary Benefits of Mass Transit

In 2003, I took a job running a bookstore in Costa Mesa. I was living in Koreatown, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles. The difference between the two is about 50 miles. 50 miles through Southern California traffic, down the 110 to the 405, is, well, unpleasant. On a typical day, it took me an hour and a half to get work and another hour and a half to get home. I made this commute in a Dodge Neon that leaked oil, had intermittent air conditioning, and no CD or cassette player. I listened to a lot of talk radio. I discovered things I never thought I'd know: where the traffic always slowed, mysteriously, on the 405, the cadence of Jim Rome's many dead air pauses (Rome, the master of the dead air pause), the lay of the fairway on the 8th hole at Domingez Hills (it's right off the 405), where Brookhurst is (Fountain Valley. Until I took that job, it was just a name intoned mournfully by the traffic reporter every morning).

Looking back on that commute, I can't help but think of the time wasted, the hours spent in a steel box, waiting, waiting, then finally moving. I sometimes wondered what else I could have been doing with my time. It turns out, I could've read War and Peace or listened to the entirety of Wagner's Ring Cycle. This handy chart, from Good Magazine (who has a fancy new website with a lot of, um, good content) shows exactly what I could've accomplished with all that time.

My commute these days is much shorter -- I can generally drive to work in under thirty minutes -- but, for the most part, I've stopped driving to work. Instead I take the train, changing trains at Union Station, and walking the final six or so blocks to Vroman's (check it out on the Metro map here). This trip takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes, depending on trains, each way. In other words, it's about the same as the commute I had into Orange County back in 2003. But otherwise, it couldn't possibly be more different.

Initially, I began riding the Metro for environmental reasons (and economic, of course), but as I've grown accustomed to riding the train every day, I'm starting to notice the secondary and tertiary benefits of mass transit. I'm getting some exercise (I always take the stairs up from the station), and man, am I getting some reading done! Since I started riding the subway to work, I would estimate that I've read three times the number of books I read in a similar time span while commuting by car. In fact, I've read more books than I did last year already, and last year I worked mainly from home, with a commute of roughly three seconds (from my bedroom to my living room). And I'm enjoying my commute so much more. I arrive at work having already jump-started my brain with an hour of reading (and a liter of coffee), and I'm ready to begin my day. I haven't read War and Peace yet (It's a touch too heavy for the train), but thanks to my commute, I can at least envision a world where I have the time to tackle it.

Booker Shortlist Announced

The six finalists for the Man Booker Prize for fiction have been announced. They are:

• The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga
• The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry
• Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs, by Linda Grant
• The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher
• A Fraction of the Whole, by Steve Toltz

Obviously, there were a couple of surprises, namely the omission of The Enchantress of Florence and Netherland. I'm happy I have a horse in this race, as I'm pulling for Aravind Adiga's dazzling, wildly entertaining The White Tiger. Thoughts on the shortlist, anyone?

Some Links, and a Correction

• Since we're all about accuracy here at the Vroman's Blog, I must point out that the list of books quoted in a post about Sarah Palin's book banning desires was fictional. No specific books were mentioned in her discussion with the Wasilla librarian, although such a discussion definitely took place: "But on Monday, Oct. 28, Emmons said Palin asked her outright if she could live with censorship of library books. This was during a weak when Palin was requesting resignations from all the city's department heads as a way of expressing loyalty."

• Robert Giroux, the "G" in FSG, has passed away at the age of 94. When I first started paying attention to who published what sort of books (probably about eight years ago), it became immediately apparent that FSG published the kind I liked.

• Some big political titles hit the shelves this week. In fact, I think I'm going to make a hot key for that phrase, since I imagine I'll be using it a lot in the coming months.

• To fans of the New England Patriots, don't despair -- rent the first season of "Friday Night Lights." (The Times Quad Blog is having an ongoing discussion of the Buzz Bissinger book the movie and series is based on.)

More substantive posts are coming later this week, promise.

Vroman's Podcast 4: David Benioff

David Benioff's new novel City of Thieves is Vroman's favorite book of the moment. Everybody at our store who has read it has loved it. It's a book that appeals to many different kinds of readers, and I have a hunch it will appeal to you. At once literary and thrilling, dramatic and comedic, romantic and sexy (Yes, sexy!), City of Thieves is one of the most readable, well-written, and exciting books of the year. (Did I mention that we really like it?)

In this interview, which runs about 33 minutes, we discuss the rather coy prologue of the book, how his screenwriting has shaped Benioff's fiction, Arnold Schwarzenegger's skinny calves, and the speeding ticket Benioff got on his way to his Vroman's event back in June. Listen now!

(Click here to download the podcast to your computer.)

Jennifer Egan: Internet Oracle?

I'm reading Jennifer Egan's Look at Me at the moment (It's great, by the way), and this passage jumped out at me:

"It's not a magazine--it's a database," he said. "What I'm doing is, I'm optioning the rights to people's stories, just ordinary Americans: an autoworker, a farmer, a deep-sea diver, a mother of six, a corrections officer, a pool shark...Each one of these folks will have their own home page--we call it a PersonalSpace(TM)--devoted exclusively to their lives, internal and external."

...

Each one would be different, he explained, to reflect the life of the individual, but certain categories would be standard: Photographs of the subject and his or her family. Childhood Memories. Dreams. Diary Entries...And people could add their own categories, too: Things That Make Me Angry. Political Views. Hobbies."

Look at Me was copywrited in 2001, a full year before Friendster, two years before MySpace, and three years before Facebook would go live. I can only conclude from this that Jennifer Egan is psychic.

Thursday Morning Links

A smattering of links from around the global computerized network:

• Via The Morning News comes the Houston Chronicles' hilarious "Love Song of Patrick J. Buchanan." "I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the tassels of my Weejuns rolled."

• Joshua Henkin, guest blogging at The Elegant Variation on the one thing that bugs him about Mad Men, "the show's unflagging insistence on reminding me when it takes place." I think I'm in agreement on that, with its pregnant mothers puffing Merit's and swilling Merlot. Still, it's a fun show.

• The Flaming Lips "Do You Realize?" has been nominated for official rock song of Oklahoma. "Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?" Boomer Sooner, Boomer Sooner Rah Rah Rah!

• Aravind Adiga, author of the terrific novel The White Tiger (nominated for the Booker), writes an interesting blog for The Guardian. His most recent posts recounts his efforts to rent a flat. (Check back here in the future for more Adiga related material.)
  

Some Links for Wednesday Morning

A couple of things to think about while you adjust to your new, September life:

• Banned Books Week is coming up fast, and Sarah Palin probably can't wait. When she was mayor of Wasilla, AK, Palin asked the local librarian "how she could go about banning books?" Her reasoning was that some voters thought they contained inappropriate language. Among the books she sought to ban were Brave New World, everything by Stephen King, and everything by JK Rowling.

• When somebody who writes about a kind of music I love says what she's listening to at the moment, I take notice. Amanda Petrusich's book It Still Moves is rocketing up my "To Read" list.

• Rick Riordan and Scholastic take aim at kids who are "as engrossed in the internet and video games as they are in books," with the new 39 Clues series. (By the way, we are having our own 39 Clues Scavenger Hunt in just a short while, if you're interested.) No word yet on whether Sarah Palin plans to ban it or not, but we'll keep you posted.

• Apparently there was going to be a fifth and final Twilight book, Midnight Sun, and still might be, but it won't be coming for a while, thanks to some overeager fans who posted excerpts of it. As a response, Stephenie Meyer has posted a draft of the book on her website, so that curious fans wouldn't have to feel bad about reading it an unsanctioned Meyer site. Very interesting move from an author with a history of carefully monitoring how her books are covered online.
  

Back to School

Millions of children are heading back to school today (or tomorrow, if there are teacher meetings and what not), and to celebrate, an incomplete list of great books about high school:

While Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers doesn't take place at school, the protagonist is studying for his O-levels, so I count it here. Full of rakish wit, teenage awkwardness, and hipster rebellion that would mark so many of Amis's early novels. When I remember myself in high school, I remember myself as Charles Highway. Unfortunately, I was more like George Michael from "Arrested Development."

"Me and Mrs. Mandible," (in the collection Sixty Stories) by Donald Barthelme. A grown man is trapped in Mrs. Mandible's third grade class. He'd like to get out, but at the same time, he's kinda in love with the comely Mrs. Mandible. What's a guy to do?

Old School, by Tobias Wolff. A beautiful story perfectly told by Wolff, this is the tale of a kid at an elite prep school trying to win the school's literary contest so that he can meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I haven't read this book, but I hear good things about it, so it goes on the list. The story of a working class girl at a toney prep school, told in a frank, sometimes graphic manner. Sittenfeld is getting a lot of ink right now for her new book American Wife, which is not-so-loosely based on Laura Bush.

Home Land, by Sam Lipsyte. Kind of a cheat on a list like this, since Home Land is about a classic "loser" -- Teabag -- writing to his alumni newsletter. But what a book! Lipsyte perfectly captures high school's unique ane enduring ability to humiliate and belittle. A one of a kind book from one of the best comic writers of this generation.

An incomplete list, for sure. What books take you back to high school?

Summer Reading: A Recap

It's Labor Day, which means that, yep, summer's over. Time to look back at my summer reading and see how I did. Back in May, I wrote a post about what books I'd be reading this summer. It wasn't the most ambitious reading list of all time -- no Proust or anything ridiculous like that -- but I still didn't bat a thousand:

The Known World. It's still unkown to me. I kept thinking "It's next, it's next, it's next..." but it never was. I will get to it eventually. Too many smart people have told me it's great. But it didn't happen this summer.

Murder in Amsterdam. I read this one! A very thought-provoking book about the limits of multi-culturalism and tolerance. Buruma didn't really come to much of a conclusion, which kept the book from having the sort of revelatory power I was hoping for, but the exploration of the issues was enough to make it an enjoyable and educational book.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. I was going to read this, but Edan told me that she liked Willful Creatures better, so I read that instead (also, we own a copy of Willful Creatures, so expediency won out). I loved that collection, especially the story about the boy with keys for fingers. I'm counting this as a win for me.

In the Drink. I couldn't get a copy of this, so sadly, I didn't get to read it. I am going to dig around for a copy this fall.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Read it in Hawaii. Loved it. Watched the BBC miniseries with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Also great, although they made one big plot revision I didn't necessarily agree with.

Please Excuse My Daughter. Like you don't already know.

Decline and Fall. Nope. Edan read Brideshead Revisited this summer (I'd already read it) -- can we count that? Sadly, no dead Englishmen on this summer's reading list.

So what's that? 4 for 7? Not bad, right? Plus, I read a bunch of other books this summer, books that I didn't expect to read, books that I kind of had to read, and books that I loved. Now for fall -- Infinite Jest. Maybe. How did you do this summer?