Why did I ignore the obvious. Good point.

Guys writing these fast is hard.

Dude write something in 12 hours that's long and see how well you do.

Pages 396 to 402.

About 30 pages' worth of stuff.

This is an excellent comment. I am duly chastised.

Pages 20 through 30, roughly.

Not a word, alas.

My eyes glazed over a little during the sections detailing improvement in diving gear, but it's mostly narrative.

Very cool, thanks for the heads up. Any further reading you'd recommend besides the Digital Dilemma stuff?

There's much more on Lightning Over Water than The American Friend. In general, everything after 55 Days To Peking gets 50 pages out of a nearly 500-page text.

There's a lot of procedural stuff in there for sure. It's a brisk read (186 pages), so if that interests you it's almost certainly worth a look.

Insofar as we try to cover a broad range of fiction, the Mitfords still seem relevant to me. Jessica and Nancy have stayed in print, and they've generated a small cottage industry, which is pretty impressive. And yeah, I'm a fan and was interested in reading this in general. And review copies, always.

Depends on what you value most in A Fan's Notes. Pages doesn't have those emotionally brutal qualities; it's mostly straight ranting, degeneracy and invective (mixed with thoughts on Edmund Wilson, of all things) and not much else, which I find highly entertaining. Your mileage may vary etc. And if you *really* like…

For whatever it's worth, that's pretty much why I was interested in reviewing this. A Fan's Notes is the official classic, and it's great (goes in and out of print; think it's in right now), but Pages From A Cold Island is highly entertaining, though often criticized for disorganization. It's the kind of work that…

I'm no expert either, but White Shoes & The Couples Company seems to be a decent starting point. I've been listening to it and it's fun; probably a little too elaborate at times (one song comes back in a woodwind version that almost lasts nine minutes) to qualify in the strictest definition of "twee," but that's no…

Yup. And this has been a weird month of reading for me, because Tanenhaus' Whittaker Chambers bio was also cited in The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It all comes together.

*The God That Failed. Ugh, sorry.

Yeah, the latter. I wouldn't say the guy's a natural prose stylist, but he's certainly read enough to litter the book with sly paraphrases and jokes like that — not necessarily relevant to the subject at hand, but keeps the tone broad.

The basic criteria are narratives made by defectors from Communism just before and after World War II, so Solzhenitsyn's out. The That Failed does come up a number of times though.