"'A Time of Gifts to Be Born' is a strange mix of sophisticated New York comedy and European travelogue."

Especially confusing since most books only have *imprints* on their spine. Why would a normal reader of an FSG title, a Flatiron book, and a Henry Holt book know that all three come from a company called Macmillan?

Only five now!

Penguin Random House
Macmillan
Hachette Book Group
Simon & Schuster (nearly merged with PRH)
HarperCollins

RFK Jr. is a guy who was meant to commit a series of themed animal crimes in Gotham City with the ultimate goal to “eat the Bat” before being subdued and returned to Arkham.

One of these days we really need to overlap in the city!

Criterion 4K of Boorman’s Point Blank

Well, that’s tonight’s viewing sorted.

Palantir are about six months away from ordering their employees to leave audio logs scattered around their offices

It's a weird one: Lots of good sentences that never cohere into a convincing or enjoyable book. And the weird business of the protagonist trying and failing to write a novel of ideas, which we are made to read.

Johnny, who gets clean around the same time. Have just learned in book four he has become a child psychologist.

Curious about his two most recent: Seem to have received mixed reviews, but at this point I am probably committed to reading all of them!

Funny, the second is my least favorite so far: Such an ugly book, easier to admire than like, I think.

Reading Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk.

Read the first three of the Melrose books earlier this year, then decided to try his non-Melrose A Clue to the Exit, which was a real disappointment. Glad I returned to the Melrose books, which seem to be written by a much better writer.

Also: How can I trust your analysis of character when you were represented by (and may still be represented by) John Brockman?

Remember the New Atheists? And the argument they were really just New Islamophobes? Harris doing a great job vindicating those arguments!

book described

18. Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. More like Against the Night’s Sleep the way it made me wanna keep reading. Some of Pynchon’s best prose but doesn’t all hang together but wouldn’t edit anything out either so it is what it is in all its blazing brilliance.

The Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker once wrote a play called "If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil is in It," and it failed so badly he spent the next seven years in debtor's prison.

Fellow ghost story aficionados, I need your help. I read a short story years ago that I *believe* dates to the very early 20th c about a skeptic who goes to a seance and ends up being haunted by an invisible entity that feels like a hairless animal and has a musky smell. I can't find it anywhere.

Sitting here crying while after getting WhatsApped the photo on the right, so let me tell you a little story about how we got here from the photo on the left and why repatriation research matters!

Just watched Michael Powell's Honeymoon, 1959 Spanish travelogue spliced with ballet and flamenco sequences.

It's not The Red Shoes, and could benefit from having more in the way of characters, but the two stylized sequences were worth it.

Picked up The Ritz on the Bayou, a staff pick from @portersqbooks.bsky.social a few days back, hope to start reading this weekend.

The best horror movie of the year so far is a Japanese NFT Here’s the weird way to watch this excellent movie

Maybe she will start bankrolling Kiyoshi Kurosawa. www.polygon.com/24172471/chi...

Seriously, I also want to know!

Didn’t realize that, though I knew the Pynchon and Bainbridge songs. Plus the Basil Bunting one.

OK, but don’t sleep on Mark Knopfler’s solo work.

After David Bowie, he’s probably most bookish rock star.

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

This is one of my dreams TBH

Curious to hear about the Fitzgerald bio. Spent fifty cents on it at library sale, but want to read all her major works first.

True Detective S5

Still the best thing I’ve ever seen.

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