Reading

On this page: books I’m reading, plus digital odds & ends I loved.

book log (last updated 7/19/18)

Current: The Leavers, Lisa Ko
Ten most recently read: The Feminine Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer; The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright; A Gambler’s Anatomy, Jonathan Lethem; Hystopia, David Means; Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi; The Golden House, Salman Rushdie; The Blood of Emmett Till, Timothy Tyson; The Schooldays of Jesus, JM Coetzee; The Friend, Sigrid Nunez; American War, Omar El Akkad.

recommended reads & internet bites (most recent at the top)

– A brief history of sex in American fiction (Bookforum)
– ‘He wrote like he was shooting for something’: Alex Wolff remembers Frank Deford (Sports Illustrated)
– What makes a parent? (New Yorker)
– Elizabeth Strout’s long homecoming (New Yorker)
– The book that scandalized the New York intellectuals (New Yorker)
– How an animal lover turned her father’s investment into a money-losing website (Gawker)
– Don DeLillo on researching Libra (Rhys Tranter)
– The empire of edge (New Yorker)
– The CEO whisperer (Fortune)
– Before the law (New Yorker)
– Donald Antrim and the art of anxiety (NYT mag)
– Wrong answer (New Yorker)
– One of a kind (New Yorker)
– Diagnose this (Harper’s)
– Old school (New Yorker)
– How to fail in business while really, really trying (Fortune)
– The new king of chess (New Yorker)
– Life as a terrorist (Harper’s)
– Postscript: Peter Kaplan (New Yorker)
– Dirty Medicine (Fortune)
– Up all night (New Yorker)
– The Hanging (Atlantic)
– Here is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie (NYT mag)
– The body in room 348 (Vanity Fair)
– The lives they lived: Adam Yauch (NYT mag)
– Comic strip: Only mouth (Berfrois)
– A slice of a house in Poland (NYT)
– Inside New York’s last sensory deprivation tank (Awl)
– The cranky wisdom of Peter Kaplan (TNR)
– All about Andy Roddick (Grantland)
– How William Faulkner tackled race and freed the South from itself (NYT)
– When a hazing goes very wrong (NYT)
– Confessions of an Ivy League frat boy (Rolling Stone)
– What happens when a 35-year-old man retakes the SAT? (Deadspin)
– Lucian Freud, interrupted (Vanity Fair)
– Barry Minkow: All-American con man (Fortune)
– How a podiatrist sign became a literary icon (Salon)
– Tintin, boy reporter (NYT)
– Consensual hallucination and Mario Kart (Last Word on Nothing)
– Life after Zionist summer camp (Awl)
– David Mitchell, the experimentalist (NYT)
– The temptation of Tiger Woods (Vanity Fair)
– Farmhouse palette (NYT)
– A conversation with John Irving (NYT)
– Infinite Jest photo tour of Boston (flickr)
– A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life (David Foster Wallace Once a Day)
– The mystery of Bartlett Lake (Vanity Fair)
– Charlie Rose interviews David Foster Wallace, 1997 (there are four parts)
– He was a crook (Atlantic)
– Radiohead when they were in high school (one, two)
– The diner scene from “Five Easy Pieces” (YouTube)