Beat the Reaper: A Novel by Josh Bazell My review rating: 4 of 5 starsI knew I would enjoy this book from page 1. It’s fast-moving, muscular, and funny. I won’t get into summary, here, beyond the fact that it’s about a doctor with an unusual past and skillset in a crappy hospital in New …
Washington Post Is Folding Its Book Review Section – NYTimes.com. It continues.
Book Publisher Suspends New Acquisitions – NYTimes.com The publishing biz is in major trouble. I think the days of ‘big publishing’ by corporate media behemoths are coming to an end.
Or is it? As mentioned in an earlier post, I recently read David Markson’s The Last Novel, and I was deeply impressed. Markson has written a series (is ‘series’ the right word? I don’t know) of—oh, let’s just call them novels—a series of novels that are more collections of literary trivia and anecdotes with the …
[Note: My son Sean is the genius behind the title of this post. He thought my simple title of 'Reading' was lame and boring, apparently.] Well, I’ve gotten a little bit behind in my book reviewing, here. Since September, I’ve read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem—which is the ass-kickingest piece of science fiction I’ve read since William …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
