Harlan Coben: By the Book
This week’s New York Times‘s Sunday Book Review includes an interview with one of my favorite thriller authors, Harlan Coben.
Related Posts:
From Distant Admirers to Library Lovers–and beyond
The Pew Research Center continues its study of how the public perceives and uses libraries:
This report describes nine groups of Americans that reflect different patterns of public library engagement. Respondents were sorted into groups based on a cluster analysis of factors such as: the importance of public libraries in their lives; how they use libraries; and how they view the role of libraries in communities. . . .
The typology examines four broad levels of library engagement. These levels are further broken into a total of nine individual groups:
High engagement
- Library Lovers
- Information Omnivores
Medium engagement
- Solid Center
- Print Traditionalists
Low engagement
- Not for Me
- Young and Restless
- Rooted and Roadblocked
Non-engagement (have never personally used a public library):
- Distant Admirers
- Off the Grid
The descriptions of the various groups and their attitudes toward libraries are informative.
9 Terribly Dysfunctional Marriages in Literature
Lists like this always amuse me. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don’t, and other times I haven’t read many of the books included.
But I’ve read most of these books and so pretty much agree with this list:
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- The Ice Storm by Rick Moody
- Frenzy by David Grossman
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- “Temporary Matters,” the opening story in The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Dark Quotient: On Victoria Redel and Destructive Characters
the Manhattan-based author Victoria Redel actually seems to enjoy answering questions about her work, which often takes the form of fiction addressing an intense — even boundary-violating — bond between a parent and child. But don’t ask her about her personal life.
Following the 2001 release of her novel Loverboy, about a mother so enmeshed with her young son that she decides to asphyxiate him in a car rather than let him go to school, Redel has found herself explaining to readers that her creation of unlikable, even destructive characters is neither a window — nor an invitation — into her psyche.
A good article for readers who always wonder how much a writer’s works reflect the author’s own mind and soul.
JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf: bring on the monsters
This week, HarperCollins announced that a long-awaited JRR Tolkien translation of Beowulf is to be published in May, along with his commentaries on the Old English epic and a story it inspired him to write, “Sellic Spell”. It is just the latest of a string of posthumous publications from the Oxford professor and The Hobbit author, who died in 1973. Edited by his son Christopher, now 89, it will doubtless be seen by some as an act of barrel-scraping. But Tolkien’s expertise on Beowulf and his own literary powers give us every reason to take it seriously.
