Hope this time he’ll put on a shirt

First of all, shouldn’t Bright Shiny Morning have a comma? Secondly, Janet Maslin loves the book to pieces (I know you got that) even though her actual description of the book still sounds awful. At Publishers Weekly, Sara Nelson calls it a trainwreck and a page turner. I won’t totally rail on the book, but I’ve read that it’s littered with wacky factoids about Los Angeles. I don’t know if I’ve ever really gotten into a full-on rant about how much I hate this Wikipedia-as-literature tripe that Pahlaniuk and other pseudo-social satirists think is actually an effective device and I won’t today, but who’s with me? I want to read Gaddis not City Search.

Luckily there are other writers out there who are willing to write actually truthful memoirs and this brief interview (via Bookdwarf) with A.M. Homes shows that honestly, who are these people with blown up memoirs trying to fool? Also, Homes’ short story Do Not Disturb is something you should seek out. Brilliant.

Via Sarah Weinman, a wanna-be novelist writes a book about a cop that can’t be killed by bullets and then gets shot to death. The worst parts about this:
1. People are really loving the book.
2. It was finished four days before his death
3. He was an auxiliary policeman, which apparently means he was a really nice volunteer who wanted to clean up the streets but also didn’t carry a gun.
4. Auxiliary policeman can’t carry guns no matter what.
5. The book is about a wolfman.

The Elegant Variation already gave away some Amis book, but they also link to this review for Underworld I’ve never seen. As Mark mentions, there is a big difference between the Amis then and the Amis now.

Please note that even though up above I said I want to read Gaddis, I haven’t actually read Gaddis.

The Booker cubed has been shortlisted to six, and I for one am very happy to not see Life of Pi on there. Maybe I’m being unfair to the extremely popular book, because I haven’t read a word, but it just didn’t seem that good. Someone, please tell me how I’m doing the literary world a great disservice by flipping off Yann Martel. Also, my vote for the winner is Disgrace because it’s the only book on there I’ve read.

And finally, via The Millions, here is a nice piece about everyone’s favorite past time- burning books. There isn’t much to say about the piece, except that it has some of the books the Nazis really were into burning, and it talks about how Helen Keller was a socialist. Did you know that? You did? Why didn’t you tell me? That’s crazy.

Posted Mon, 12 May 2008 13:39:42 and filed under Writing, Criticism, Scandal, Shane, Critics, Awards, Authors, New York Times, Rant, Short Stories, Writers. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.