- The 50 Greatest Cartoons, with video. (via Kevin Smokler)
- The Times: “Educated people are not supposed to believe in ghosts. This has done nothing to diminish their popularity, at least in fiction.” (via Kenyon Review)
- Children of Men: the book vs. the film.
- The next generation’s vocabulary is, like, diminishing. (via Maud)
- The San Francisco Chronicle offers a list of 2006 deaths, with many authors and journalists. Conspicuously absent are the great talents Octavia Butler and Gilbert Sorrentino, demonstrating that you can win a MacArthur Genius Grant or radically influence experimental fiction and still not earn so much as a sentence from the mainstream media.
- CNN: “A giant ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields has snapped free from Canada’s Arctic, scientists said.” No global warming, eh? (via Michelle Richmond)
- Israeli literary critic Gershon Shaked has died.
- Reports of the American movie’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
- The excellent 10 Zen Monkeys serves up an overview on world sex laws.
- This week in ridiculous book trailers: Hannibal Rising. (via Ghost in the Machine)
- Kitchen Sink Magazine is folding. (via Warren Ellis)
- Historical Fiction for Hipsters. (via Largehearted Boy)
- Mr. Ewins is going crazy with the top ten lists.
- Reuters’ Mark Porter investigates the ongoing demise of the indie bookstore.
- Print aesthetic pleasantries from Fade Theory.
- Contributors to the New Yorker Winter Fiction issue share their fave books of 2006. Ian McEwan’s faves are particularly interesting.
- “Jack”: “the name of an instrument that supplies the place of a boy.” Well, that’s being a bit coy about a euphemism, Webster.
- Hitch on Gerald Ford.
- A tourist map of Gotham City.
- From earlier this year: Lethem on James Brown. (via Telescreen
- Technorati vs. Google Book Search.
- Well, I, for one, cannot be bribed or have my opinion purchased. Absolutely no price.
Roundup
– December 29, 2006Posted in: Roundup
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
It makes me sick what’s happening to the ice shelves.
I’ve seen that cartoon list before – there’s some creepy racist toons on there. The best cartoon ever is on there, though – “Feed the Kitty”. It’s so cute, you have to watch it!
I don’t care if that booklist is for “young” hipsters, I want to read all those books now!
That Feed the Kitty is great. It’s been removed from YouTube, but I found it on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6762987539031638117
Actually, Ed, if you listen closely to Dubya’s public comments, you’ll notice that he has quietly shifted from “global warming doesn’t exist” (though Jim Inhofe still insists that’s the case) to “okay, it exists, but there’s no proof that humans are causing it.”
Sometime in 2007, I suspect he will shift once again, this time to “okay, it exists and humans are causing it, but stopping big corporate polluters from doing it threatens the very foundation of the free enterprise system and will unnecessarily harm the profit and loss statements of some of my very best pals.” Though I’m sure his speechmakers will come up with a more graceful way of saying it.