The 75 Books Every Man Should Read

Esquire has a slideshow of "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read." How many have you read? I'm not proud to say that a quick accounting has me at only about 26.

In Defense of Amazon

Over at TNR Ruth Franklin defends Amazon from its detractors. I love Amazon. I live in a place that has two cities about fifteen miles apart with a quarter of a million people or so combined. There is a Barnes & Noble in Midland and a Hastings (which sells books, music, dvds, video games and the like) in Odessa, and those are fine, but Barnes & Noble, even with my member card, does not exactly provide discounts on its books, and while B&N has a pretty extensive collection, nothing matches Amazon for either competitive pricing or variety.

If we had a great independent bookstore in the area I would surely provide it with my custom occasionally, but when I am working on a book or article there are times when I will need to get a number of books and will not want to use the library, especially if these are books I'll use again and again for current and future projects. Amazon is a lifesaver for those of us not surrounded by myriad bookstores that compete with one another for price and variety, and for those millions of readers who live in places much smaller than I do Amazon has surely transformed their options. Amazon is not ideal. But I'm sure glad that it exists.

NBCC Recommends

The National Book Critics Circle (of which I am a member) has posted its quarterly Good Reads Lists of new and recommended books at the NBCC blog Critical Mass. Naturally such lists inspire a great deal of debate, as the comments section indicates. And the nature of these lists is that the point is to highlight books recently published, so that the list is compressed -- certain kinds of books take longer to get reviewed, especially independent or academic presses, and reviewers based in the academy often operate with longer timetables. Nonetheless, any time we focus on good books, whatever the limits of that focus, is fine as far as I am concerned.

The New Haven Review of Books

It's not the American Review of Books that my friend, erstwhile golf partner, and some-time mentor Jeff Herf famously called for a few months back at Open University, and it might only be a one-off, but The New Haven Review of Books has produced an issue. Even if this is not a one-time thing, it is unclear whether the NHRB will do more than involve the estimable talents in the New Haven area, but in an era of newspapers reducing their books coverage, at least the folks within Yale's penumbra have gotten the ball rolling.

Lunch With Strangers

Over at The New Republic Micheal Kinsley has an amusing account of a lunch he never had with President Reagan. My favorite element of the piece is his description of the "Washington Read" whereby one flips to the index to see if one earned mention in any given book. The writer's equivalent is to comb a book's bibliography (or, more ponderously, the notes) to see one's own work mentioned. Such solipsim simultaneously represents both incredible high self-regard and equally incredible insecurity. And I'll admit that I'm guilty with both psychological motivations undoubtedly at work.