ThomasLitchford

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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My friend John e-mailed me this link about ‘misery lit,’ a.k.a. ‘grief porn.’ While I’ve certainly been aware of it, mainly via supermarket and Target book sections that inevitably include copies of A Child Called ‘It’ and it’s sequels, this is the first I’ve seen about a specific genre or special bookstore section. Does Borders [...]

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I’ve finished Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love, and I enjoyed most of it. His writing style reminded me of Paul Auster’s.
One of the things that drew me to the book was its critical praise (it was a National Book Award finalist in 2000), but what made me actually buy it was that it was set [...]

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This morning, I bounced over to Metacritic — an aggregator of film, music, game, TV, and book reviews — to take a look at their composite review of James Frey’s new book Bright Shiny Morning. Except what I found was this message:
*Note: Metacritic’s regular coverage of Books has concluded with the final Harry Potter installment. [...]

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I put down The Comfort of Strangers last night, reluctantly, at about midnight. I only had twenty-five pages left, but I was exhausted. So this morning, before getting out of bed, before coffee, I finished it.
This is a short, mean little book. It’s less than 130 pages long, so many readers could polish it off [...]

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I’ve been in one of my fiction slumps in 2008. Maybe it’s because a lot of my reading time has been usurped by parenting time, but it’s also more than that.
For one thing, I spend a lot more time online than I used to. The proliferation of blogs and the movement of print content onto [...]

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This obituary is like a biography in miniature. Fischer was a fascinating character, whether you’re interested in chess, or not.
Interestingly, if you’ve read The Jewish Policemen’s Union The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, you might recognize some character traits and a certain style of play described by Chabon.
Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64 - New York [...]

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n+1 is a New York journal dealing in things literary, political, and intellectual (and probably in a lot more than that, too). I first heard about it in connection with Ben Kunkel, the author of a much doted upon coming of age novel, Indecision (the linked to review at Slate is slightly more measured than [...]

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I can’t believe I missed this:
“The Uncommon Reader” [by Alan Bennett] posits the theory that the right book at the right time can ignite a lifelong habit. (For the fictional queen, it’s Nancy Mitford’s “Pursuit of Love.”) This is a romantic ideal that persists among many a bibliophile.
-A Good Mystery: Why We Read - New [...]

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[T]he key point in the business is that the investment is made in the wrong areas in the business, and I think that quality—which is more valuable over time—has been undervalued, and quantity—which is less valuable over time—has been overvalued. And I think this is a reaction to the dominance of the influence of the [...]

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