ThomasLitchford

I mentioned in an earlier post that I would be ordering James Wood’s new book, How Fiction Works, immediately. Thanks to our Amazon Prime membership, I had the book in my self-consciously sweaty hands a mere two days later, and I have now finished reading it.
The title of this book should perhaps be amended, thusly: [...]

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I finished reading Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco a while back, but I’m torn about my review.
The book is basically a thinking man’s The Da Vinci Code, but it came out in the 1980s. It follows a group of three editors (well, two editors and one philologist who fancies himself ‘a kind of private eye [...]

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Deciding which of New York’s bookstores to visit should not have been difficult. There are a lot of choices—Barnes & Noble, Borders, Housing Works, St. Mark’s, Gotham Book Mart—but the one to see is the one we (kind of) stumbled on: Strand Books.
We arrived in the city with a long mental list of potential things [...]

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The Web Urbanist has a beautiful post about books as design elements. I especially like the color-coded library organization scheme. It reminds me a little of Rob’s autobiographically arranged record collection in the film High Fidelity. Maybe in the book, too; I don’t know; I haven’t read it.
It looks like I could easily kill an [...]

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It’s interesting how some of these posts take shape. I’ve been meaning to write about the cover story of this month’s issue of The Atlantic—‘Is Google Making Us Stoopid?’—since it came out, but I didn’t know what to actually say about it until now.
John sent me a link to the Guardian’s books blog about American [...]

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As publishing moves into the digital future, Jonathan Karp sees the end of disposable books:
Many categories of books will be subsumed by digital media. Reference publishing has already migrated online. Practical nonfiction will be next, winding up on Web sites that can easily update and disseminate visual and textual information. Readers of old-fashioned genre fiction [...]

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The last novel I finished reading was Other People by my hero Martin Amis. It wasn’t his best showing. It was one of his early novels, and it feels like he struggled with the storytelling aspect of the novel. His trademark style (hard, accurate prose, black humor) was taking shape, but it took one more [...]

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John sent me the following e-mail:
Lists are dumb, but you’ll probably have an opinion about this one.
Entertainment Weekly’s The New Classics: Books
To which I replied:
Yeah, I saw this and thought about blogging it. We actually get a free subscription to Entertainment Weekly because of some concert tickets we bought like three years ago. They just [...]

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So, I didn’t get any pictures of the actual madness of the book sale (the lighting in there would have made for lousy pics, anyway), but here’s a shot of what we brought home.
If you’re a stickler for accuracy, you’ll find that there are 24 books here, not 21. Three of them were purchased off [...]

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Yesterday, the Newport Public Library began its summer book sale. They arranged all the books people have donated and the books the library has taken out of circulation (for whatever reason) all along these long tables in the cramped lower lobby. Most of what’s on offer is total crap, but you can occasionally find a [...]

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