"I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review." --Roger Ebert

Like everyone else I am stunned practically into silence by Roger Ebert's passing, news of which broke today. Ebert had just announced this week that his cancer had recurred and he would be cutting back on day-to-day writing at his truly spectacular site, and that was bad enough news for those of us who love his writing. I think the best memorial that can be offered is to point toward his thousands of reviews and to his funny, earthy, amazing memoir LIFE ITSELF.

Ya burnt, John O'Hara

Of the many delights of LIFE ITSELF, just one for now: Roger Ebert recalls a college professor who deemed John O'Hara a "first-rate second-rate author" -- fine with young Roger whose tastes leaned more toward Thomas Wolfe instead. Ebert would later review his professor's book badly, and then be capsized with guilt over it, but appreciate his words sometime later when he almost flunked out of study-abroad eligibility.

It's a great book, is what I'm saying, and I'm glad one of my coworkers (hey, P.!) is reading it simultaneously so we can talk about it later.To be a little unfair to a writer I otherwise like, this is the kind of nostalgia book THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE THUNDERBOLT KID wishes it was.

"I lived in a world of words long before I was aware of it. As an only child I turned to books as soon as I could read. There was a persistent need not only to write, but to publish. In grade school I had an essay published in the mimeographed paper, and that led me directly to a hectograph, a primitive publishing toy with a tray of jelly. You wrote in a special purple ink, the jelly absorbed it, and you could impress it on perhaps a dozen sheets of paper before it grew too faint. With this I wrote and published the Washington Street News , which I solemnly delivered to some neighbors as if it existed independently of me. I must have been a curious child."
--Roger Ebert, from the first chapter of his memoir

Just made my first Kindle preorder

of Roger Ebert's memoir LIFE ITSELF, out September 13. Important question: Will I be able to start reading it at midnight the day of the book's release? Oh, goody!