Being a book reviewer must be fun if only for the occasional chance to sharpen one’s knives on some inane romance writer’s leathery hide.
[cosmopoetica reviews jong clitoris nixon]

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More on authors trying to assert copyright on historical “fact” vis a vis the DaVinci Code. Am I the only one that finds this sickly funny? The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are just trying to have their cake and eat it too…
[cosmopoetica copyright]

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Bert Webb writes:
A new — or new looking — book is a treasure.  In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again.
[cosmopoetica, reading, books]

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A somewhat testy review of Dennett and, occasionally, his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

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A good profile of Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times:
…beneath the social science data, Gladwell is selling something for
which there’s always a market. “I’m by nature an optimist. I can’t
remember the last time I wrote a story which could be described as
despairing,” [...]

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Jeanette Winterson on the publishing that should not be:
“First, we stop publishing books that needn’t be books. People who don’t really read don’t really need books — so let them have Jordan and Becks in lots of other ways.”
[cosmopoetica, books, publishing, winterson]

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I’ve been enjoying Paul Ford’s Ftrain site for most of the morning. At its core is a blog of anecdotes, mini-essays, and fictions, as you can see from the front page. But I like the way it provides multiple points of entry: the typical reverse-chronological list, the much less common forward-chronological ordering, and the almost [...]

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The part of me that used to work in a library likes this kind of light subversion…

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Breakfast with Brontosaurus
I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom

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Lone Star Statements, by Matthew Baldwin
“Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.”

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Gina at a sad day for sad birds quotes this piece from Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures, a timely reminder that I really need to get my hands on this book:
The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays.
Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek [...]

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One of the recurring, chain-letter-like questionnaires floating around the lit blogs right now asks if the reader has “ever had a crush on a literary character.” If you haven’t, then you either need to start reading books that don’t have any pictures… or give up on the enterprise altogether. Maybe reading’s just not for you. [...]

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QUICK SYNOPSIS: An entertaining look at a fascinating mechanism of the human mind– rapid cognition– and how it works (and doesn’t work) in the real world. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought about how people think, pop-science afficionados, Malcolm Gladwell fans, and lovers of entertaining writing… in short, just about everyone.

Blink, by Malcolm [...]

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Booklust asks why Jonathan Franzen’s the author everyone loves to hate. I have no idea. He’s an excellent writer, judging not only by The Corrections, but from his wonderful collection of essays How to Be Alone which was full of pieces that had me nodding my head in agreement. And he spurned Oprah, as so [...]

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I’ve tried like hell to get into Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell which according to many, many review should be something I would really enjoy. But despite great physical production values, a good idea, and generally satisfying writing, all the little pieces don’t come together for me into something I could enjoy. Or [...]

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Hmmm… if Kasey and one of his students are both in the Best American Poetry 2004 Anthology does this mean the post-avant literary elite will have to stop slagging it? Or will it still all suck except for those two poets– I mean poems since we know it’s all about the work, not the hip-factor [...]

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I’ve been reading Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (read an interesting review from the Guardian, see the Amazon listing). Written under the heteronym Bernardo Soares, the Book of Disquiet is a journal of sorts, a kind of writer’s notebook in the guise of the observations of a bookkeeper about art, literature, and emotion. In short, [...]

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So who was first? K. Silem Mohammed, John Latta, Nick Piombino, Josh Corey– that’s just from my last 20 minutes of blog-reading… there are probably others. Jonathan would have an interesting list, I bet, if he weren’t busy being snarky to Greg@Grapez.
Many good things to buy! Too many…

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Bloggers are all kinds of people… and they have all kinds of reading habits. What are bloggers reading right now? Phil Gyford decided to find out and then Jason Kottke noticed and garnered more than a few comments of his own.
Me? My current and upcoming reading includes:

Something Like an Autobiography (Akira Kurosawa)

Night Swimming (Pete Fromm)
The [...]

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