Yes, you read that correctly. I’m staring out into some Spring like weather here in Cambridge. I hope to escape for a lovely run on the Charles this afternoon. I dashed off to Atlanta last week to visit my folks for Thanksgiving. I didn’t read as much as I had planned, but I did finish Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl, one of the awesome NYRB Classics series. It’s a strange and compelling book, marred by the unfinished ending. Now I’m entranced by Chang-Rae Lee’s new novel The Surrendered. The first section got me choked up a bit, but it’s too soon to past judgment on the rest. The novel involves several viewpoints who shift back and forth in time and I want to see how he pulls the story lines together. I’m going to leave you with some links for your reading pleasure.
- The New York Times has announced their Ten Best Books of the Year. Meh. It’s a good list. Nothing exciting though.
- Cory Doctorow put together some thoughts on the future of bookselling.
- The Wall Street Journal asked me and some other booksellers to recommend books to particular people. It ran in last Friday’s paper. There’s sort of a link, but you can’t see the cool graph they printed!
- The Millions has started their annual Year in Reading lists!
- There’s a new Ian McEwan story in this week’s New Yorker.
The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled–as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett.
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