New feature round here. Every Saturday I'm going to post up the fiction I'm reading, including any thoughts I may have on it, and ask you to do the same. On Sundays, I'll do nonfiction. On Mondays, I'm thinking of doing music. Nonfiction I have no problem collecting, but my reach on new music and new fiction tends to be a bit short, so I'm going to tap into all of you to help me. Here we go:
• Michael Shaara's Killer Angels: About 40 pages left to go, my thoughts on this one are here.
• When I got back from my trip, my girlfriend gave Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and John Irving's The World According to Garp. Both look good.
• Am most of the way through The Atlantic's fiction issue. It's middling. Joyce Carol Oates' chimed in with a story that, to be honest, seems like the sort of thing I would've written four years ago after reading Brave New World or watching The Matrix. I was hoping for better. The issue has some gems (particularly Nathan Englander's How We Avenged the Blums), but is, on the whole, too reliant on snapshot, self-important fiction that signals profundity by eschewing plot and just trails off after nothing quite happens. Sometimes those stories work, but not many of those in this issue have.
Your turn. What's on the nightstand?
