Thursday, September 15, 2005

Coming up next, Thumb Drives and Oven Clock's Fall Lets Sleep for 14 Hours a Night week

It's Fall Fiction Week over at Slate--their "second annual look at the novel," featuring much article-y goodness. Because I'm such a nice guy I'll save you a few clicks and point you directly toward the round-up of last year's fiction week, which seems almost monomaniacally focused on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, so I won't be reading much of that until I get around to reading the book, which is still on my coffee table from the library from when I picked it up so I could read a bunch of other stuff some other people wrote on it. At the rate I'm going, I'll need to block off three times as much time as it takes me to read the book just to read all the extraneous materials.

This year's pickings seem a bit more diverse, so far. If pressed for an answer, I'd say I found the article on why Zadie Smith shouldn't get the Booker prize to be pretty interesting (and might I add that I'd be happy to take any of that fame and prestige off her shoulders if she's looking for someone to give it to--maybe we could split it 50/50?), and that this Francine Prose essay on why style rules and plot drools made for a good read, and that I plan on reading this article on "the conservative novel that liberal feminists love", once I'm more awake than I've been feeling all week.

And lest I be seen as playing favorites with the five-letter S-titled indie-news web-sites, Salon posted their end of summer reading list a few weeks back, and a take on Proust that sort of made me want to read Proust (wrapping up their "Summer School" series). And some other stuff. So go forth, click, be merry; I'm going to go pass out now.

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