A Momentary Taste of Being

Much attention has been focused on Mr. King's time travel We're told here that it is another thousand page brick of a book.  Ah, for the discrete pen of a competent copyeditor.  Having perused a couple of these in the past from Mr. King, he was far better at it when he had the assistance of someone who knew how to trim the fat--take The Stand and The Bloated Stand .  Sometimes less is better. We must wait and see.  A thousand pages outside his normal genre.  We'll need to see what that looks like.

"Lost Translation" found A work thought to have been lost in a bonfire a year after Lewis's death has been uncovered and is to be published.  I think I got this link from Books Inq.

And Steven King's time-travel novel is announced.  It will be interesting to see how he handles the themes. What is intriguing to me is how many people think that writing outside one's home genre is something readily done.  I encounter it time and again. "I plan to write an SF novel." "Oh, have you read much SF." "No, but I watch movies and TV." It might not occur to such a one, but that acquaintance is insufficient to sustain a literary work with the specific conventions of a genre.  Many think that they will be ground-breaking and convention shattering, but to shatter conventions, one must know what the conventions are. All this really has nothing to do with Mr. King's book--it just occurs to me as a result of a conversation that occurred this weekend.

Ten Forthcoming Irish Novels

Barnes and Noble blog--20 books we're waiting for

The Millions What to read in 2011 via Books Inq. Semicolon: What to read in 2001 via Brandywine Books There are too many books here to detail, and many of them look like things to pick up in 2011.

Forthcoming Books 2011 Nothing in this list for me, and there are some oddities.  Isn't the Michael Cunningham already out? 

50 Books you might want to read in 2011 I must confess that except for the Oyeyemi, this portion of the list inspires nothing like the excitement of part 2.

50 for 2011 part 2 Okay, so here are some books of interest.  I see that Petina Gappah has a new one due out.  After An Elegy for Easterly , I can think of only two authors I would more eagerly anticipate.  Yes, you've already guessed the first--Yiyun Li.  And the second would be Maaza Mengiste, author of the magnificent Beneath the Lion's Gaze . But, oh my goodness, the announcement that sends chills racing up and down (and I mean that literally, as I type they are just subsiding) Rohinton Mistry has a new novel coming out.  That has to be on my very highest anticipation list!  Again, the only one I can think of in the same league would be Uwem Akpan.

From The Millions--books to look forward to (or dread) this summer Both C (Tom McCarthy) and Now Listen to This (by Alex Ross, whose first book The Rest is Noise is a splendid guide to 20th Century Classical music and its influence) caught my attention. Oh and a Pevear and Volkhonsky Doctor Zhivago !

Mark Twain speaks: his autobiography to be published.   via Books Inq.

Beatrice and Virgil reviewed at Biblioklept I did read, and enjoyed enormously Life of Pi.   I little care if every book club in America read it and enjoyed it.  It does not matter to me that it is sometimes classed with YA books.  The book itself is solid, interesting, and conceives of a rather interesting voyage and the questions it raises about faith and living in sacred time are interesting far beyond the measures of the book.

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