- The Man Booker folks have set up a blog. Some preliminary thoughts on the nominees: “SARAH WATERZ ROCKZ!” and “YO! MOTHER’S mILK. pwned. lol!”
- Book World discovers Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend for the first time and takes umbrage with the protagonist’s growing paranoia and savagery. I don’t think Matheson intended Neville to be a beacon of sanity. The great thing about apocalyptic stories is that it permits the author to explore how fundamentally warped the human race is. And I’m sure if a league of vampires continuously screamed, “Come out, Champion!” without letup, I’m sure that, no matter how I think I’d react, I might end up a lot worse than Neville.
- Is Barbara Walters so insane after all? (via Bookninja)
- Why? (via The Millions)
- Ronald D. Moore on Star Trek‘s 40th anniversary. (via Locus)
- The Telegraph appears to have confused its book section with a gossip column.
- Is Karl Rove the Machiavellian genius everyone’s made him out to be? Or not?
- Clive Owen supports Daniel Craig as Bond. I only wish that he could have endorsed himself in the role before they cast Craig.
- President Bush promoting global literacy? Huh? His own words: “One way to defeat hopelessness is through literacy.” Remember that as you contemplate who sits in the White House for the next two years.
- Move over Bulwer-Lytton. Is Amanda McKittrick Ros the world’s worst writer? More here.
- James T. Kirk: literary inspiration?
- Why the rich go broke.
- Journalism is becoming increasingly female-centric.
No! Really, no umbrage has been taken. I said I wouldn’t *react* like Neville and what I had in mind was that after ransacking all the bookshops and libraries and taking all the world’s books home with me for free, I would be a far worse survivor than he. Go out and kill vampires armed with nothing more than a flimsy piece of wood and some silly French cooking ingredient? No way. I’d stay in with the books and the whisky.
In “Why the Rich Go Broke,” I hope you didn’t miss my favorite bit, in which George Foreman drops a literary allusion:
QUOTE:
Mr. Foreman, street-smart and now mindful of his wallet, has his own perceptive answers to those questions. For the man who came back from the brink, it’s all a matter of discipline and proper boundaries.
“A lot of people just don’t grow up,” he says. “I mean, 65-year-old men. They just don’t grow up. They don’t understand that money does not grow on a tree and that you’ve got to respect every dollar. Like Rip Van Winkle — the guy who slept — they party, party, party, then they wake up. ‘Oh my God!’ And they do something desperate trying to recapture what they had. And it doesn’t work like that. You must stay awake.”