Good to read this! I was considering both the Whitehead and Towles books but didn’t know much about them as authors. Right now I’m reading a book called Paranoia by Viktor Martinovich — he’s a Belarusian writer and it’s a sort of dystopic romance in the context of a panoptic state. Reads like it’s from the Cold War,…

This exactly. Trebek is kind of a dick, when you really start to look at what he says to these contestants during the “lets fill in three minutes of showtime with stupid banter” segments. This one though takes the cake. My guess is as he’s getting older his filter for saying stupid shit is weakening. They let this one…

Maybe I’m wrong because I don’t know enough about when he wrote each book, but it seems to me like the stories and especially the issues he writes about have been written so many times already, by others. I find him completely unoriginal.

I’m in the middle of all sorts of things. One is the collected letters of Eudora Welty and Ross McDonald. Another is Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fielder (seriously, a must). I’m still in the middle of the 3rd volume of The Story of the Stone, I plan to get back to it this week, and my before-bedtime…

I tried to read A Little Life, but found that there weren’t highs and lows in it - it just kept dragging me down, and was a never-ending journey into a dark pit. I can see how it would be worth studying as an exercise in writing, but there’s no joy in reading it. I don’t have time for that - there are too many great…

Yes! I have very fond memories of listening to my lit professor give a smackdown to two of the most pretentious, Pynchon-obsessed dudes in one of my grad seminars on why they shouldn’t dismiss genre fiction out of hand after we had just read Lilith’s Brood.

I agree with this. A few years ago, I heard about a coalition of North American First Nations writers (in Canada and the U.S.) who are poets and share in the common goal of presenting First Nations peoples, history, issues, etc. in their writing. I remember there were some very well known names, i.e. maybe Erdrich,…

Now that the first songwriter has won, this paves the way for Beyonce to win when she’s older. If she continues to produce songs the way she has been for the past few years, she will and probably should win. Also, hopefully rappers.

Literally anyone? Like, Jonathan Franzen?

I would have liked to have seen Ursula K. LeGuin or Octavia Butler, another two game-changers, win a very big prize. The former is still alive, but I can’t see the Nobel people recognising her.

I do get why people love her, I’m just more or less meh on her.

My position is always “anyone but Phillip Roth.”

Oh, I love/hate this conversation, because I (personally, subjectively) don’t like to read Atwood’s books, but I agree that she has the stature and deserves the recognition.

What about Adonis, the French-Syrian poet? It would have been deserving and politically interesting to give it to one of the few Arabic poets. Plus considering the fact of the Syrian crisis.

Margaret Atwood, although I suspect it will never happen.

“Who knows how he was feeling when he walked off the bus or what he needed to do in the relationship, because when he came off the bus along with Mr. Trump I had no feeling but, professional. That’s it.”

UPDATE - JEFFREY LORD IS CITING TMZ AS A NEWS SOURCE! YALL I AM FUCKING DEAD

Totally agreed. In fact, I don’t really care about Bran’s interactions with other characters at all at this point, since he’s more plot device than character. I’d be perfectly content if all of his interaction with his family was indirect through his new abilities, similar to how flashback Ned ‘heard’ him, and he…