Tag: Literature
What Makes a Great Airplane Read?
by Eva Holland | 08.31.09 | 4:52 PM ET
I have a confession: Last week, I enjoyed the greatest airplane reading of my life. I’ve never been much of an on-board reader—for a long time, I was one of those passengers who was asleep before take-off, and who needs a good book when you have the gift of in-flight unconsciousness? But lately I haven’t been able to drop off to sleep the way I used to, and I’ve become a restless, impatient flier.
Enter—don’t laugh—the Twilight saga. Over four days, the bestselling teen-vampire-romance novels got me through 17 hours of flying time, two hefty ground delays and one long scheduled layover. They also got me thinking about ideal airplane books. What factors have me reading straight through until landing, oblivious to the hours passing? And why do some titles leave me fidgeting in my seat after the first hour?
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Yahoo! Buzz20 Years Later: Reading up on the Berlin Wall
by Eva Holland | 08.31.09 | 9:34 AM ET
With the 20th anniversary of the wall’s destruction coming up in November, the time seems right for a look back. Here’s a handy starting point: The Guardian’s books blog has a thoughtful list of 10 must-reads, fiction and non.
Brit Lit and Venice: A Love Affair
by Eva Holland | 08.27.09 | 3:00 PM ET
In the Independent, Peter Popham has a thoughtful essay about the world’s—and, in particular, the British writing community’s—ongoing fascination with Venice. He writes: “Venice is the great seducer, the feminine city incarnate, risen like Venus from the waves and always threatening to sink into them again; demanding to be rescued, to be immortalised yet again by pen or brush, even though already, 250 years ago, one jaded visitor complained it was a city ‘about which so much has been said and written—that it seems to me there is nothing left to say.’”
He wraps up the essay with a list of artistic Brits who’ve gotten caught up in the city’s charms, from Lord Byron to Elton John. I’d add Jan Morris’ “Venice” to the list of worthy titles Popham mentions.
Could Literature Cure the Fear of Flying?
by Eva Holland | 08.19.09 | 12:08 PM ET
In the latest issue of Granta, Javier Marias has a fun and thoughtful essay about his fear of flying and how it has started to abate in recent years. And, he believes, “a little more literature” would help him, and other nervous fliers, feel even more confident:
I would like to ask Iberia, in this the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church—all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona—and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in the The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo.
(Via The Morning News)
Ben Gibbard, Jay Farrar Team Up for ‘Kerouac’s Big Sur’
by Michael Yessis | 08.17.09 | 12:09 PM ET
Death Cab for Cutie singer/songwriter Gibbard and all-around alt-country standard-bearer Farrar had never met before collaborating on the soundtrack to a new documentary about Jack Kerouac, “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur.” Paste spoke with the pair about their work on the album, which will be released October 20.
Gibbard had previously written for Paste about his experience writing the most recent Death Cab album at the same cabin where Kerouac wrote “Big Sur.”
Jack Kerouac: Canadian Icon?
by Michael Yessis | 08.14.09 | 2:37 PM ET
Who Are the 100 Greatest Writers of All Time?
by Eva Holland | 08.12.09 | 10:26 AM ET
According to the folks at This Recording, these are. The list has a few surprises—and a few surprising omissions. Isak Dinesen, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain are among the travel types that made the cut. (Via The Book Bench)
NPR Types Pick 100 Best Beach Books for NPR Types
by Michael Yessis | 07.30.09 | 1:04 PM ET
Almost 16,000 “book-loving NPR Types” have finished voting on the best beach books of all time. The top 5:
1) The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
2) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3) The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
4) Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
5) Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
My suggestion from last week finished at No. 99.
Postmodern Reads From Around the World
by Eva Holland | 07.23.09 | 3:59 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times books blog, Jacket Copy, offers up a fun annotated collection of 61 essential postmodern reads—and, with authors hailing from Japan, Bosnia, Chile, Italy and beyond, it’s a globally flavored list. Turns out that extraordinarily long (or extraordinarily short) books that—among other listed qualities—play with form, comment on their own bookishness and blur reality and fiction know no borders. (Via Kottke)
A Beach Book Bounty for Travelers
by Michael Yessis | 07.21.09 | 12:53 PM ET
Some consider this beach reading. Most people, though, want something a little fluffier. A little something, as NPR puts it, “enthralling enough to inoculate vacation-goers against the vagaries of missed flights and bad weather.” To find the best beach books ever, NPR has put it to a vote. They’ve narrowed down the list of nominees to 200. You can vote for 10 books.
You can’t go wrong, by the way, by casting one of your votes for Carl Hiaasen’s Florida romp, Sick Puppy.
Gadling, too, is in the mood for a beach read. Katie Hammel’s six great beach reads for travelers includes books from Bill Bryson, Rolf Potts and Eric Weiner.
The Plight of the Paris Bouquinistes
by Michael Yessis | 07.15.09 | 3:16 PM ET
Times are tough for the booksellers along the Seine. Mildrade Cherfils writes in GlobalPost:
For centuries, used booksellers, with their unmistakable dark green boxes perched along the banks of the Seine River, have been charming and permanent fixtures of Parisian life.
Or as Christian Nabet put it, “we’re part of the scenery.” And that’s partly a problem, as he sees it.
“Look,” Nabet said, pointing toward a sizeable group of tourists who wandered past his stall with hardly a notice of the classic titles, which he has been selling in the same spot for about a decade. We’re “a little like the animals at the zoo.”
John Cheever: Summer Vacation, 1954
by Eva Holland | 07.08.09 | 1:29 PM ET
The Book Bench bloggers spent last week looking back at some favorite New Yorker fiction of summer vacations past. All their selections are worthy, but this excerpt from John Cheever’s “The Day the Pig Fell Into the Well” really resonated with me. Here’s a quick teaser:
In the summer, when the Nudd family gathered at Whitebeach Camp, in the Adirondacks, there was always a night when one of them would ask, “Remember the day the pig fell into the well?” ... The perfect days—and there had been hundreds of them—seemed to have passed into their consciousness without a memory, and they returned to this chronicle of small disasters as if it were the genesis of summer.
San Fermin Festival: Flickr Meets Hemingway
by Alicia Imbody | 07.07.09 | 11:29 AM ET
Hemingway chose Pamplona as the backdrop for his first great novel, "The Sun Also Rises." In honor of the fiesta, we've put together 12 photos that capture the spirit of San Fermin, accompanied by some classic lines from the novel it inspired.
See the full photo slideshow »
J.G. Ballard’s Shanghai vs. J.G. Ballard’s London
by Michael Yessis | 07.02.09 | 10:49 AM ET
Reason looks at the life and legacy of J.G. Ballard, comparing the dueling influences of Shanghai and London on his life.
In Shanghai fear and hunger and violence were right in front of him; there were dead bodies lying in the streets where he bicycled. As an adult in the comfortable London suburb of Shepperton, by contrast, Ballard had to look under the surface to find the darkest parts of the human psyche.
More Postcard Stories from Geist Magazine
by Eva Holland | 06.29.09 | 9:20 AM ET
Once again, Geist has announced the winners of the annual Literal Literary Postcard Contest—in which writers submit very short stories inspired by vintage postcards. First prize went to Mark Paterson’s Spring Training, a compact piece about a boy not traveling to Florida for pre-season baseball every year.
‘Away We Go’ in Search of Literary Street Cred?
by Eva Holland | 06.18.09 | 1:23 PM ET
Publicity still via IGN The Book Bench takes a saucy look at “Away We Go,” the Sam Mendes-directed, Eggers/Vida-penned flick that recently got the World Hum Travel Movie Club treatment.
Writes blogger Jenna Krajeski: “Mendes ruined his reputation around the library when he suffocated Richard Yates’s masterpiece [“Revolutionary Road”] on the silver screen. Is he trying to win back his literary cred?” Or, she wonders, did the two novelists throw the game deliberately in the name of the printed page? “Perhaps there’s no better way to prove that novelists should stick to writing novels than to have two skilled fiction writers fail at writing for the movies.” Ouch.
Happy Bloomsday!
by Michael Yessis | 06.16.09 | 3:47 PM ET
A few links from around the internet to commemorate Bloomsday:
- AFP Reports that, despite the global recession, thousands of James Joyce fans streamed into Dublin today to celebrate.
- In the Guardian, Declan Kiberd explains just why Dublin has come to embrace Bloomsday, calling Ulysses “modernism’s most sociable masterpiece.”
- Colum McCann wrote a touching piece in the New York Times about how Ulysses provided him with comfort and connection to his late grandfather.
- Of course, on Twitter you can follow @StephenDedalus and @LeopoldBloom.
James Franco Reads Jack Kerouac
by Michael Yessis | 06.16.09 | 11:23 AM ET
He bites off an excerpt from “On the Road,” which will appear in Lapham’s Quarterly’s summer issue simply titled, “Travel.” It’s a solid reading, but, alas, as you can hear below, he’s no Jack.
A Flight Attendant’s Bookish Ethical Dilemma
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.09 | 12:35 PM ET
J.T. from Georgia posed this question to the New York Times ethicist, Randy Cohen:
I am a flight attendant. I was working a flight from Europe when I recognized Michael Connelly, my favorite author, on board. I told him I was reading his novel “Brass Verdict,” and he kindly offered to autograph it. The catch: it is a library book. Must I return the signed book to the library, or can I replace it with a new copy in a suitable jacket?
The answer is entertaining, and not just because of the line about what Cohen would do if he met “the ghost of Jane Austen on the D.C. shuttle.”
Travel Movie Watch: ‘Where’s Waldo?’
by Eva Holland | 06.03.09 | 2:05 PM ET
No, seriously. The goofy globetrotter with the striped shirt is getting a movie all his own. And it will be live action. Over at Get the Big Picture, Colin Boyd has a scathing look at the project, suggesting that Universal’s decision to pick it up after Paramount gave up on it “might showcase a fairly pronounced stupidity.” I’m inclined to agree.