Any day now I will be crushed by the teetering stack of books beside my computer that I’ve read but not yet reviewed here. Hopefully that will happen before I get around to Julian by Gore Vidal.

Anyhow, unwilling to break with tradition and downright frightened at the thought of approaching the Stack, I feel compelled to mention The Digested Read by John Crace. A regular column in The Guardian books section, The Digested Read is the anti-hype answer to the publishing world’s gushing. It creates a bit of balance. In the columnist’s words:

The idea of rewriting a book in the style of the author in just 500 or so words is a gift to any satirist, and it remains the only outlet in the print media where publishers’ hype always gets treated with the irreverence it deserves.

The basic premise for the Digested Read is that it should be the book that has created the most media noise that week.

I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for parody and satire as it takes a great deal of writerly skill and wit to pull off. Besides which, when done well nothing is more hilarious. John Crace is not always brilliant, but is nevertheless an enjoyable and necessary voice in today’s media-mad world.

This from the re-write of Life Class by Pat Barker:

They lay on the dingy bed as the trains rattled past the window. “My husband will kill us,” Teresa said nonchalantly. “Look, he’s even written me a note to that effect.”

A fan website for Dostoevsky! No need to give up on humanity just yet! There’s even a forum to discuss him and other Russian authors you love.

And if you haven’t gone yet, here’s something to make you curious. At the site you can see a bigger version of this:

No, I’m not going to tell you what it is. Off you go! And post on their forum — the world needs more people talking about books!

“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”
Crime and Punishment

Okay, it’s not true — but it feels that way sometimes.

I love Paris and can’t imagine living anywhere else, but I crave English-language bookshops. I dream about them: stuffed to the rafters, esoteric, carefully chosen, Daniel Steele/John Grisham forbidden on pain of death…they’ll even have that biography of Keats (the corrected edition) and oh, where’s my list?!?

I’m salivating. Sorry.

So, to ease the pain, I’ve been trawling the web in search of well-written, well-thought-out blogs by people who read. My blog is a scattered mess, added to only when I have a spare second. These people’s blogs are what mine aspires to.

So Many Books (I’ve been reading this one for ages. Magnificent!)

Chekhov’s Mistress

NovelWorld

***Find of the month (thank you Chekhov’s Mistress!): Zbigniew Herbert

Another irreplaceable, old-school travel writer gone.

Here’s a bit of audio with couple of short snippets of interviews with Eric Newby and his wife Wanda short article with a great photo and the official Guardian obit.