Book Miscellany

Here is some book-related miscellany, to whet your appetite for a summer of reading. I'll be posting my summer reading plans as soon as I make them.

The Guardian has the summer plans from several dozen leading lights of contemporary literature, including Banville, Barnes, Ishiguro and Mantel, as well as the execrable Eggers. Though I confess the book that Eggers recommends, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, intrigues me (I'd love to read a story about Namibia that doesn't involve Brad Pitt), I'm tempted to ignore it solely on the basis that Eggers had something nice to say. That's probably not fair to Peter Orner.

And I couldn't agree more with this rant from Bookslut, particularly now that I'm trying to buy all my books in hardcover:

There's something really irritating about discovering that books you love are out of print. Even though used bookstores, and sites like Abebooks, Alibris and Powell's have made it pretty easy to find them, it sucks that the publishing industry has given up on some great work from some great authors, while books like M is for Murder and N is for No, Seriously, Murder and O is for Oh My God Someone Just Got Murdered are readily available at every chain bookstore in the land. You might say that there's a good economic reason for this, to which I respond: I failed economics, bitches. So take that!

Finally, I love this collection of rejection letters. I'm tempted to start writing a manuscript for submission just to say I got rejected by The Paris Review. I doubt that's quite the approach most aspiring writers take, but I'd have a much better shot at meeting my ambitions!