Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Odds and Ends


1. Despite my fears, the Michigan trip went pretty smoothly. (Spirit Air rocks, in sharp contrast to most of their competition.) As you can see, we hung out with 107,000 or so of our dearest friends at the game and Michigan dispatched State without too much difficulty.

2. R.W. Apple, Jr.--better known as Johnny Apple--passed away last week, and I've been remiss in not mentioning this sooner. He was a famous old school reporter for the New York Times. I have to admit that I found his writing about current events (particularly the stentorian tone) a little hard to swallow. However, he also wrote a lot of entertaining stuff about food--more accurately, he ate a lot of food and drank a lot of wine in various exotic places and wrote about it in the Times (and on the Times' dime). That would be a pretty cool job to have. The annoying Adam Nagourney had a remembrance in today's DI/DO. Check it out, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

3. I note, via Amazon, that Charles McCarry's Secret Lovers--one of a series of novels about CIA agent Paul Christopher that I have raved about below--is being reissued by Overlook Press in November, just in time for Christmas. Robert Littell's The Company is amazing, but I don't think McCarry has a peer amongst contemporary novelists on the CIA beat. Most of the books were out of print, but the good people at Overlook have been periodically reprinting them.

4. Since I'm on the subject of reading, a few additional items:

a. Late last week, I finished Julian Barnes' most recent book, Arthur and George. I've had it for a while and started it several times, but just couldn't get into it. However, this time I persevered and it was worth it. It's a wonderful book. The Arthur in the title is Arthur Conan Doyle, who gets involved in a trying to help a young man (the George of the title) who is wrongfully convicted of dismembering animals exonerate himself. Based on what I gather are true events, it's a mystery of sorts mixed in with biographies of the main characters. If you haven't scratched your Holmes itch in a while, check it out.

b. Over the weekend, while on several airplanes, I managed to fly through (so to speak) Philip Kerr's The One from The Other, which I mentioned a few posts below. It's quite good, up there with the Berlin Noir stories and far superior to his recent Hitler's Peace. If you enjoyed any of the Furst books that I have recommended, I think you'll enjoy this one too (though it's more of a police procedural than a spy story).

c. Finally, anyone who likes to read knows there are simply way too many good books out there to ever get through them all. And, as Alex Beam of the Globe notes, most books published these days are badly written and probably not worth reading anyway. With that in mind, here are some very handy tips on "How Not to Read a Book."

Posted by jwb at 6:33 PM   

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