Black Garterbelt: “In short, Nick Hornby suffered through The Road. So much so that he slipped the surly bonds of the first-person to touch the face of You.”

With projects like this, we’ll no doubt be seeing plenty of critical or dissenting reviews. It appears that Penguin would rather bribe you with books, so that you can write about the books on their blog, rather than your blog. What makes this any different than a horde of Coca-Cola executives standing around watching you every time that you drink a soda?

The morning — indeed, a good part of the day — is filled up, but I’m hoping to offer a few posts this afternoon. Also, many podcasts, containing quite a few provocative conversations with a few possibly unexpected figures, will be released in a matter of days. Bear with me.

If you are in any way a literary person, you must read Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. Throw everything down. Forget that passable novel you’re reading. This is the real deal.

I will have considerably more to say about this extraordinary book later.

An anonymous comment at the National Book Critics Circle blog:

Has book coverage started on Truthdig? If it has, it’s very invisible on the home page. Second, those of us who are interested in literature and literary culture wish all you folks would stop talking about yourselves for a few minutes and start reviewing some more books. Most of you work from assignment, so you can’t necessarily be blamed, but since we can read any book review we want these days, why do we have to read so many reviews of the same twenty books every week. That this “campaign” to save book reviewing takes up so much of your attention is only further evidence of how important you all think you are. It’s actually the books that are important and so many of them–books that are often far more interesting than the few that you sheep are all getting your two cents in about every week–just disappear without a bit of attention. If literature is to survive, it has to do something that movies don’t do, it has to move forward, it has to grow. This hammering away at Delillo, Chabon, Díaz by all of you at once is downright boring. Folks who read are looking for a disovery, not the same old same old. Your homogeneity spells the death of culture in this country. If, indeed, we ever had one.