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November 27, 2017

From The New York Times (Anthony Bourdain on "What’s the last great book you read?"):
Truly great? Charles Portis’s “True Grit” is a masterpiece. Don’t settle for seeing the film versions. One of the great heroines of all time and a magnificent book filled with great dialogue.

From The New York Times (Anthony Bourdain on "Whose writing today most inspires you?"):
Donald Ray Pollock was a revelation when I first read “The Devil All the Time.” Daniel Woodrell’s work. Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings” was incredible. Lydia Lunch takes no prisoners … ever. I’m inspired by her utter fearlessness. William T. Vollmann is intimidating in his sheer volume and courage and ambition. But when I find myself in a hole writing? I always go back to Elmore Leonard, he was a professional. And Edward St. Aubyn. His writing thrills me.

From The New Yorker:
[Of] white people who still lived in their childhood home town, nearly sixty per cent supported Trump; of those who lived within a two-hour drive of their home town, fifty per cent supported him; of those who had moved more than two hours from where they grew up, forty per cent.

From The Economist:
Amazon’s biggest impact is still in e-commerce. In America it accounted for more than half the growth in online spending last year. More searches for products begin on Amazon than on Google.

From The TLS (William Boyd on Books of the Year 2017):
When I was at university trying to earn a bit of extra cash one of the strangest jobs I had was to read Joseph Conrad’s Victory out loud to a blind Italian boy. Two hours a day, five days a week. He would frequently stop me reading so he could type notes into his braille typewriter. Consequently we managed about three pages of the novel a day and it took about six weeks to read the whole thing. This surreal, enervating experience put me off Conrad for years, though I’ve slowly been reassimilating myself, particularly enjoying The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, perhaps the first true spy novels. This process has been hugely encouraged by Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a global world (William Collins). Lucid, revelatory and wonderfully concise, The Dawn Watch celebrates Conrad’s uncanny prescience and shows his continued relevance now in the twenty-first century.
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