"I imagined it would be quite easy for me and in fact, it turned out to be monstrously hard. I hated every second of it, regretted that I had agreed to it, and after reading one or two stories each day, found myself exhausted. The discovery I made was that any number of stories are really meant to work, and only work, in the mind’s ear and hearing them out loud diminishes their effectiveness. Some of course hold up amusingly but it’s no fun hearing a story that’s really meant to be read, which brings me to your next question and that is that there is no substitute for reading and there never will be. Hearing something aloud is its own experience but it’s hard to beat sitting in bed or in a comfortable chair turning the pages of a book, putting it down, and eagerly awaiting the chance to get back to it."

--Woody Allen, on recording audio versions of his own books

Be still my... heart: Variety reports that Daniel Craig is in talks to play Blomkvist in the inevitable "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" adaptation. Craig has appeared in adaptations of MOLL FLANDERS and THE GOLDEN COMPASS and also played Ted Hughes opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the Sylvia Plath biopic.

Self-portrait, age 4

Except for the lack of psychic powers, the supportive parents and the not reading Dickens in preschool, it's pretty much all there. Here's to more Miss Honeys and fewer Miss Trunchbulls. What children's book character do you identify with the most?

Filmbook: "The Social Network" full trailer

An adaptation of THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES by Ben Mezrich, who surely could not have dreamed his book would turn out looking like this:



"The Social Network" will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in September, which gives you about two months to read the source material. After you watch that, check out the Best Week Ever parody about the founding of MySpace.

Via Things I Ate That I Love: Penguin's new Ink series gives old books new covers designed by tattoo and poster artists. I had seen that edition of THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM around but hadn't realized where it came from. I think this one is my favorite even though I haven't read the book yet, it's just so garish.

Have you had your rage today?

"I read [David Foster Wallace's] INFINITE JEST when it came out and I didn't love it. I looked down on it. I was like, Oh, he's using things from Gaddis's RECOGNITIONS; he stole that. What a fucking shit I was. Then I reread it and started watching interviews with the guy. He looked exactly like me, the old back-flipped hair, like pictures of me in the '90s. I thought, Man, I want to interview this guy. I'll call Rolling Stone and ask, "I would like to interview David Foster Wallace." That was my big plan. Then he went and selfishly killed himself. It devastated me, it really did."

James "LCD Soundsystem" Murphy in Time Out Chicago (via wallace-l). Well, this is a relief; I always disliked the guy and now I have specific evidence.

“There really are demigods, and I hope that’s why I’m here,” said Tom, who wore a yellow bandanna to signify his Apollo parentage, which he believed could be true. After all, in the books, Percy Jackson does not find out that he is the son of Poseidon — not just a struggling student — until he is 12.

“I’m not here to pretend,” Tom said. “I’m here to train.”

This Times story about kids at Percy Jackson-themed camp pretending to be half-Olympians makes me deeply nostalgic for my nerdy youth.

The author as human

Last night I went to see David Mitchell read from THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET at the new-to-me bookstore Book Court. Book Court is tucked away in an unlikely storefront on a busy commercial street in downtown Brooklyn and looks much bigger in pictures, but I wasn't surprised to find every seat taken 20 minutes before the reading, even on a Friday night. Mitchell is hip right now and in the conversations around me there was a crackle of "Let's talk about how awesome our taste in books is to see what other superlative entertainments we also have in common."

Mitchell is tall and thin and stands with his feet perilously far apart, like a boxer. The bookstore clerk embarrassed him before the reading by rattling off some of his blurbs like "genius" and his position on a previous Time 100 list. The author looked sheepish but broke out into a delighted smile as a baby blatted over his thanks and welcomes. He talks very softly, almost in a mumble, and his answers to audience questions spooled out from digression to digression until he would stop and give a little shake and ask, "Now have I answered your question yet?" I couldn't have said, I was following him.

There's always a little friction when you see an author you admire in person; you fear that he will be mean or just unapproachable; you just can't picture her sitting down at her desk every day. It's irrational to say that I gleaned some insight about Mitchell just from seeing and hearing him in person; it would belie almost his entire body of work, as someone who can get so far into his characters' heads that you forget there's an author in the middle. Wouldn't be seemly to remind. But I'm doing it anyway! I was surprised at how funny he was, how unassuming. That I've been re-reading CLOUD ATLAS and it still makes my head spin is just icing.

Thanks to my blogmigo Wade Garrett for alerting me to the signing and braving the line with me.

Fools rush in

When every business and corporation has a blog, what will become of the popular stereotype of bloggers as parent-basement-dwelling Cheeto addicts who don't bother to get dressed in the morning before posting their stickles-stippled screeds? It's sort of hard to hold onto the contention of "They're just jealous and unemployed" when the fully employed are taking time away to promote their New Totally Awesome Blog Things. I suppose like most stereotypes it will just hang around in a noxious cloud until someone needs an easy appeal to hate.

What Karl Rove's book club is reading

Right now it's Brad Thor's FOREIGN INFLUENCE, a thriller about an ex-Navy SEAL working for a DoD contractor to solve the detonation of a bus of American tourists in Rome. Rove and cofounder Clayton Morris, a Fox News Channel anchor, want you to vote on what they're going to read next in Karl and Clayton's Summer Book Club; they've pledged to read a book a week through August.

You may remember Karl Rove as the guy who revealed to the world that George W. Bush was a big reader. Here's the man himself dancing like a nut and rapping in a weird Muppet voice at the Radio and TV Correspondents Dinner in 2007. Misty watercolor memories...

Lovecraft in the streets but Joyce in the...

Already tweeted but to make this official...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Well, that's unlikely, but we do have Providence in common! And we know all (once- and adopted) Rhode Islanders sound the same.

This was based off the D.H. Lawrence post from a few days ago, believe it or not. Just in case you thought I ran the lyrics for my scifi David Bowie parody "Cthulu City" instead. (Someone who knows Lovecraft better than I, please make that exist.) I ran some personal writing through and got James Joyce but I felt it would be unfair to just keep feeding text into it until I got an author I actually liked.

But do they have Billy's Pan Pizza there?

One notable detail about the allegedly existing* fourth Stieg Larsson book: In whatever state it's in, it's set in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Canada! This is the best news for our neighbor to the north since Margaret Atwood joined Twitter. Think of the tourist dollars!

--
*Book four, hereafter known as THE GIRL WHO ROCKED THE FUCKING HOUSE AND KICKED SOME ASS, has been variously reported as nonexistent, unavailable due to wrangling over Larsson's estate, half-done, and now hinted at in an e-mail.

Langerblogging: I want to read all five of those books

From a Huffington Post interview:

Shivani: Did you meet with early success, in terms of getting your first novel accepted for publication, or was it a long, hard road for you?

Langer: If I pretended that my first published novel, CROSSING CALIFORNIA, was actually the first novel I wrote, I'd say that it was easy. I'd say, yup, I finished the book, got an agent, got a contract, and started work on Book #2. But in saying that, I'd be ignoring the fact that my first novel, MAKING TRACKS, a teen detective story written when I was in high school, is still in a drawer. And so is my second novel, IT TAKES ALL KINDS, a 300-page long screed about my first week at Vassar. Also, my third novel, A ROGUE IN THE LIMELIGHT, a picaresque journey modeled on HUCK FINN and A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, never found the right agent, even though some people (well, my mother) have called it my best novel. One of my earliest agents said that my fourth novel, INDIE JONES, a slacker comedy set in Chicago's independent film world, would easily find a home at Doubleday, but that didn't happen. And I stopped looking for an agent for my fifth novel, an existential thriller called AMERICAN SOIL, when I realized there was too much personal shit in it and I really didn't want to deal with having it published. But yeah, once I finished Book #6, it was smooth sailing.

Filling me with delight, this guy. He also admits to having never taken a writing class because he didn't want to "ruin the magic."

As it is with everything else in New York, space is at a premium for authors wanting to snag a chain-bookstore slot for signings, according to the Wall Street Journal. I've been to all the Barnes & Nobles mentioned in the article except 86th and Lex, and Union Square really is the big 'get.' On the other hand, if you have 40 people there to see you, you'll feel like a loser rattling around in that space. What isn't explicitly spelled out, though, is that 82nd and Broadway is kind of a lame store overall, not just the afterthought-y event space. (I realize this is all inside baseball for people who don't live here.)

If I were an author who got to pick (and largely, they don't), I would want to go indie; the array of options is much larger. For a smaller crowd, McNally Jackson is one of the cutest, but you'd have to be a Beautiful Person to book it, I imagine. Have you been to a really good reading recently?

Where Ike Marcus was murdered

This weekend I couldn't get properly going on the LUSH LIFE show due to a combination of inexplicably closed galleries and a cold. However, if I expire in 19th-century-heroine fashion this week (the handkerchief! check the handkerchief!) at least I made it to this stop:



27 Eldridge Street, site of the murder in LUSH LIFE. (No actual gallery there.)