Month / February 2004

by DrMabuse

Would You Like Syrup With Your Waffling, Mr. Keller?

Bill Keller now states that the NYTBR “is not written for the publishing industry.” However, the bigger revelation is that Ben Schwarz is on record saying that literary fiction “doesn’t play the same role in the lives of intelligent, informed Americans as it did 50 years ago.”

Since Mr. Schwarz did not follow this statement up with any particular enthusiasm for literary fiction and since he underestimates the power of book freaks (and, also, since he hopes echoing Mr. Keller’s words will get him the job), we here at Return of the Reluctant withdraw our endorsement for Benjamin Schwarz and move to Sarah Crichton’s camp.

We urge all readers to vote hope for Ms. Crichton to take over the Book Review, which is in really silly shape at the moment.

crichton.jpg

by DrMabuse

If Only I Could Go Chopping

The Arthur C. Clarke 2004 shortlist has been announced, as have the British Science Fiction Association Award nominees. On both lists: William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Tricia Sullivan’s Maul; the former just out in paperback, the latter only available in the UK. Maul deals with quasi-feminist themes and profiles a world after “Y-plagues.”

Cinetrix has tracked down the infamous Teachout/OGIC interview.

Joyce’s “House of the Dead” has been resurrected.

And the Guardian has put up a cohrent greatest hits version of the Haddon interview.

by DrMabuse

The Rove and the Spender: The 21st Century’s Legacy to the Underclass

Presidential candidates are now in the business of revealing their favorite books.

Wesley Clark: “‘I like Hemingway and I like a lot Jewish writers (such as) Saul Bellow,’ he said. The former general also expressed a preference for the novels of John Updike and Pat Conroy.”

Howard Dean: “Dean’s favorite books: All the King’s Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion; also Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and David McCullough’s Truman (‘It is one of the books that has had the most impact on me in the last ten years’).”

John Edwards: The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone.

Bush: The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston, by Marquis James; The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, by Robert J. Samuelson; The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass, by Myron Magnet.

by DrMabuse

Quickies

The Globe and Mail excerpts Atwood’s 2004 Kenserton Lecture. She speaks on how Orwell has influenced her and her own personal dystopia taxonomy, seen in Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake.

Updates on literary film adaptations: Colin Farrell starring in A Home at the End of the World, Kirsten Dunst as Sugar in The Crimson Petal and the White (with Curtis Hanson directing), Julianne Moore as Burroughs’ mom in Running with Scissors, and, perhaps the most apt matchup for safe-and-sane mediocrity, Ron Howard and Akiva Goldman behind The Da Vinci Code.

The Oreganian covers a local reading contest. Apparently, Sue Gatton read 482 books and 157,672 pages in one year. Unfortunately, Gatton’s too busy reading that she doesn’t have the time to summarize her thoughts on the books.

And Kurt Vonnegut’s promoting Linux!