How to Buy a Love of Reading

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson explores the idea that reading isn’t for everyone, especially not for Carley Wells who sees words as enemies and says of books,  “I’ve Never met one I like”.  So if she’s not into reading whose crazy idea is it to try and buy her love?  Her parents’ idea, that’s who.  They’re determined to commission an author to write a book that even Carley Wells can love.  And Carley’s into it too, if only to help distract her best friend, Hunter Cay from his blurry world of booze, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vicodin.  Despite her resistance, Carley soon finds herself swept up into the fictional world being written for her and life will never be the same again.   Check out the interactive website and award winning book trailer too.

Salinger says

“A ripoff, pure and simple” referring to Swedish author, J.D. California’s (psuedonym) novel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. For those of you out there who are as eager as I am for some new work by the reclusive J.D Salinger, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see anything for some time, unless the lawsuit against J.D. California’s novel is part of some elaborate scam as suggested by Ron Rosenbaum,

“(Wouldn’t it be a brilliant jest on us all, for example, if Salinger himself had actually written the Holden Caulfield sequel 60 years later, hired this (apparently) Swedish guy to impersonate the pseudonymous author, then sued himself to insure no one would guess the real author? It reminds me of radio talker John Calvin Batchelor’s brilliant stunt: a mock-scholarly speculative essay published in the mid-’70s considering whether Salinger was Thomas Pynchon, who would then have been not a recluse but a pseudonym.)

Media coverage of Salinger’s lawsuit spread quickly and Stephen Colbert went so far as to “Raise High the Rage Beams” by demanding Salinger be a guest on the show to chat about what he’s been up to for the past 50 years, bananafish and more.

Listen to the NPR op-ed: Save Salinger Archives from Salinger which features a 17 minute, intriguing conversation from Talk of the Nation.

While your on a kick you can read some, Dead Caufields

The Boat

The Boat by Nam Le is worldly in scope, taking the reader from Iowa to Columbia, Tehran, Hiroshima and the South China Sea, touching briefly down in New York City, just long enough to unravel yet another story full of characters experiencing the true pain which life and the living of it, brings. While I certainly was lost for a while in the story, Cartagena, which is set in Columbia and tells the story of teenagers deeply involved in the violent warfare brought upon by drug cartels, I found my place by the story’s end. This happened throughout the collection, I’d find myself suddenly transported to a new setting full of very complete characters tangled in the heartbreak of the human condition, a son watching his dying mother, an assassin who must target his best friend. From one corner of the planet to another, our emotions, our suffering, our joy unites us. Our shared experiences, as diverse as they may be are the boat on which we journey through this life. See for yourself why Pushcart Prize winner, Le, fiction editor of the Harvard Review is making waves in the world of short fiction.
Read the first story from the collection, Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice originally published at Zoetrope: All-Story to get a feel for his style, though this one is certainly his most routed in the familiar, included in the collection.

reviewed by Jonas

You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons

You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When it Monsoons: The World on a Cartoon a day by Mo Willems.  Makes me wish I could sum up all my elaborate and wordy journal entries from my time spent in Nepal with a haiku a day, which is essentially what children’s book writer Mo Williams has done. What a journey! You won’t regret picking this up, a great on the toilet or a few pages before bed read.