Links for 7/31.

I’m not dead!  I’ve been slacking off on my bloggerly duties, but the class is over and I’m back!

Uncle Tink died early in the week, I had a bunch of final project loose-ends to tie up for the end of the class, Jeremy had his wisdom teeth removed, Mom left for the funeral, I monitored Jeremy’s medication and ran out to get him milkshakes and slurpies several times a day, and I got ready for the final.  I get my final grade sometime today and I’ve been checking, like, every five minutes.

Anyway, on with the show!

Andrew Holleran discusses Grief, which I almost bought a couple of weeks ago but decided not to after realizing that my last three book purchases featured gay male protagonists.  Perhaps I should broaden my horizons a bit.

Oh my Jesus, I’m going to vomit.  (Thanks to Bookslut… sort of.)

Meg Rosoff appeared from nowhere in her forties to win major awards with her dark and zany first novel How I Live Now – and her second book is just as edgy.

A catfight has broken out in America’s southernmost town over the future of some of its famous citizens – dozens of six-toed felines descended from a pet belonging to the writer Ernest Hemingway.
I want a six-toed Hemingway kitty.

Okay, so the Brontes’ lives weren’t quite as romantic as we’d like to think they must have been.

I Was Vermeer, Edward Marriott’s biography of Han van Meegeren, the most famous forger in history, is both gripping and psychologically fascinating, says Edward Marriott

You can only say “Poor Monica Ali” so many times and mean it.  Eventually you realize Hey! No fair! She’s published and she’s hot!

This is the third time I’ve read about Javier Marias in one morning, so maybe we should look at this.

Fifty Hot Books for Summer, including The Night Watch, Terrorist, Black Swan Green, and Alentejo Blue… and counting this article, make that four times I’ve read about Javier Marias.

On a new translation of The Three Musketeers.

My blog needs badly to be updated, as far as what has been read and what I am currently reading.  (No, I have not been reading Tender is the Night for a month now.)  Big promises for me, I know, but until classes start at the end of August, I should have ample time for the blog, not to mention my parents’ anniversary present which is now over a month late.

Links for 7/25.

Shakespeare hates your emo poems.  (Thanks to Bookslut.)

This hurts my head.  I fail to see why one would necessarily need cereal with their Proust, let alone Proust with their cereal.

Warning: this article was not written by a Christian journalist.  I mean, clearly.

Ken Kalfus’ ingenious new book about an explosive divorce might be the best novel yet about 9/11.

Links for 7/24.

Just finished my paper on Rita Dove.  Yay for me, yes?

Profiling TC Boyle again.  (Thanks to Bookslut.)

I admit it.  I still have not gotten my hands on a copy of Shalom Auslander’s Beware of God, and I’ve been wanting to for about a million years now.  But here’s an article in the meantime.

Jesus Christ.  Literally.  …Because the books weren’t bad enough.

Poor Elif Shafak.  She’s so cute, too.

Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel to be released in the US on December 5.

Mom Wins Writing Award for Gay Novel

Marie Arana’s Cellophane is reviewed, and sounds like it may be interesting.

This is the last week of my class, so if I do slack off a little bit, bear with me because it will all be over soon, and then I have a million reviews to put up.

Jinxed.

Okay, by mentioning the fact that I was “on a roll” with my reviews, I totally jinxed myself.  The computer hasn’t been working properly for several days now.  Unless it suddenly goes downhill again, I’ll be back tomorrow.  Thanks for your patience!

Links for 7/19.

Just back from a consultation to get my wisdom teeth removed.  Wuh-hoo.

New comic to be based on NBC show “My Name is Earl”.  If you want my opinion: cute show, lousy comic book idea.

Okay, that’s really and truly all I’ve found the least bit interesting today, so I’ll leave you with the Battle of the Bestsellers between JK Rowling and Stephen King.  (Parts are funny, but then it just gets weird.  Personally, I’d rather see Dan Brown get his ass kicked anyway.)

Hopefully I’ll get another review up after class tonight.  I’m on a roll!

LITERARY LIVES: Edward Sorel.

To be fair, you can’t really rate this book.  But I enjoyed it terribly.

Only a morsel of a book, it tells the stories of Tolstoy, Ayn Rand, Proust, Yeats, Lillian Hellman, Carl Jung, Sartre, George Eliot, Bertolt Brecth and Norman Mailer in slanted caricature.  (My personal favorite is probably Ayn Rand.)  My only complaint is that there aren’t a million more writers featured.

It takes no time to read and it’s funny as hell, so you have no excuse not to read it.

(See the links below for a link to an interview with Sorel and the Tolstoy story.)

Links for 7/18.

Jane Austen: chick-lit or no?  Either way, I’m a sucker for the sappy stuff as long as it’s well-written.

Old news:  Mickey Spillane dies.

Mary Watson’s top ten novels featuring “independent women“.  Finally a list worth examining.

An interview with Edward Sorel, whose hilarious Literary Lives I read recently and love-love-loved.

In The Washington Post’s Book World there is more on TC Boyle and Talk Talk, then some more, and a review of Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler’s The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein concerning the “wild party [that] gave rise to Frankenstein and the modern vampire”.

FLAPPER: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz.

Over the course of the first chapter, this book and I took some time to get used to each other.  I’m not quite the avid reader of nonfiction that I should be.  Not that it doesn’t appeal to me–  quite the contrary–  but while fiction abounds, there are only but so many books on exorcism, demonology, gender issues and my favorite films that are readily available and not totally devoid of personality.  My nonfiction collection consists mostly of authors’s biographies, interpretations of “The Exorcist”, and various lgbtq/gender studies books picked up from the library book sale.

The cover, not to mention the title, promises good-natured romps with some badass ladies, which I’m all about.  After the first chapter, I was on the fence.  Was this to be a string of women behaving deplorably and excusing it with a so-called fight for equality?  These women fought, cursed, slept around and mooched off of men to get by, which I consider to be less than admirable.  They had no interest in women’s rights, they simply wanted to get out from under their Victorian mothers’s skirts.

And it is when I understood this that I fell in love with Lois Long, on page 87.  Writing for The New Yorker as “Lipstick”, Lois Long pulled a variety of stunts, though most were harmless.  She was known for her inability to keep track of the key to her cubicle and would often appear in the office at four in the morning after a night of drinking to meet her deadline, climbing onto the doorknob and over the top of the divider in her slip to get in.

Coco Chanel was a bit much for me, but later in the book I also came to love Colleen Moore, Clara Bow, Theda Bara and **sigh** Louise Brooks (pictured right–  I never knew she existed before I read this book, but this is what I’ve always wanted to look like).

These were indeed some badass ladies, and it took me some time to understand that a great part of their magnificence was that they had no intention of becoming political or liberating women, and this is the very reason they succeeded in contributing to just that.  They wanted fun and excitement, so they took it.

Another thread running throughout the book is the story of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: their meeting, Scott’s writing, and the torment they inflicted on New York and Paris.  Zelda is indeed celebrated to an extent in this book, but I remain convinced that she was on the side of excess, even for these women.  (This judgment, however, should be left to Ms. Jen Mullen, as she must certainly surpass me as the Zelda Fitzgerald-expert.)  Indeed, it is this book that led me to read The Great Gatsby again, and follow that with Tender is the Night.

But don’t think this book is about the women only!  It’s a fascinating read for anyone interested in the time period, in fashion, or in film as well as people like me who just want to read about inspirational women.  And not being the most avid nonfiction reader, I think it safe to say that this book will hold your interest if it held mine.  The style made me cringe once every few pages, but this was far overridden by the content of the book.

Read it.  Especially if you’re a Fitzgerald fan, but even if you’re not.  Read it.

FOUR AND 1/2 STARS.
(Continue reading for more excerpts and quote from the book [besides those already posted].)

Links for 7/17.

I’ve been doing battle with my iTunes all morning.  Stupid technology.  I’m grumpy now.  But the vacation was pretty great.  Finished The Great Gatsby, almost done with Tender is the Night (trying to break that habit of moving on to new authors too quickly), and got my paper on Cynthia Ozick done this morning.

Let’s see… orphans… domestic violence… AIDS…  I know!  I’ll jump on the anti-profanity bandwagon!  Dude, what the hell?  (Thanks to Bookslut.)

Smart Girls Need Smart Porn.  Where do you think my fascination with “Quills”, “Henry and June” and “Dangerous Liaisons” came from?  (John Malkovich may be creepy as hell in other movies, but he’s totally hot in a powdered wig.)

Michiko doesn’t like Talk Talk–  surprise surprise–  and TC Boyle fights back.

Doris Lessing in defense of the popular conception of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  I knew I wasn’t the only one who like Lawrence!

In an echo of the controversy which surrounded the initial publication of the book, set partly in the east London borough, the novel is accused of reinforcing “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes” and of containing “a most explicit, politically calculated violation of the human rights of the community”.
A film adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is being protested.

Jessica Duchen’s favorite “uses” of music in novels, which includes Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, which I loved, and EM Forster’s Howard’s End and Proust’s Swann’s Way, which I know some of you have been blogging about lately.

Now I’m excited to read some Amélie Nothomb, and I’ve never even heard of her.

The ten best “smart beach reads” as I believe we have begun to understand them.

The Morning News’s Books of the Week includes Katharine Weber’s Triangle, which I will read someday.

I think most people have seen this article, but who is the voice of our generation?  I thought we weren’t supposed to have an answer for another twenty years.

Many, many reviews to come.  I swear.

Links for 7/12.

FYI, postings will be less frequent from tomorrow (Thursday) till Tuesday.  Long weekend in the mountains with my dad’s family till Sunday, concert on Monday, and I have to write a paper on Cynthia Ozick somewhere in between.

Nabokov and his butterflies.  It’s ridiculous how long it took me –reading Speak, Memory– to figure out what the hell a lepidopterist was.  (Thanks to Bookslut.)

The Bell Jar as a movie.  Film-makers approach ‘The Bell Jar’ and its author Sylvia Plath at their peril. Can the Hollywood star Julia Stiles turn angst and depression into a movie?  These people forget that Stiles’s acting career depends on angst and depression, a la “Ten Things I Hate About You”.

What’s the worst opening line you can come up with?

I may get the chance to put more up later– there are more out there– but for now I’m… packing.  Let’s say packing.