After getting captured by German soldiers, made into a POW, and then being abandoned by the German prison guards (the bombing of Dresden was in there somewhere, too) Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter home. I always wonder if these guys know they’re writing for future audiences, and how lucky his family kept the letter… The refrain of “But not me” in the letter obviously reminds me of “so it goes” from Slaughterhouse 5, which, of course, is based on the aforementioned experience.

Via Daring Fireball

Looks like Brad Pitt’s production company is about to option another Michael Lewis book. One that hasn’t even come out yet.

Plan B Entertainment, is closing on a deal to option Lewis’s next book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, a chronicle of Wall Street greed and the swollen U.S. housing market. Pitt is also considering starring.

I swear if someone doesn’t start making a movie about Liar’s Poker soon, I’m going to start typing in all caps. And I’ll mean it, too. The fact that it’s not a movie yet makes me itchy.

I think I read Catcher in the Rye for the first time in…crap, I have no idea when, it was a long time ago. Ever since, I’ve remembered Holden referring to his roommate’s ‘mossy teeth’ in this quote. And every time I use this descriptor, no one knows what I’m talking about. So, if we’re ever talking and I bring up mossy teeth, this is what I’m referring to:

He started cleaning his goddam fingernails with the end of a match. He was always cleaning his fingernails. It was funny, in a way. His teeth were always mossy-looking, and his ears were always dirty as hell, but he was always cleaning his fingernails. I guess he thought that made him a very neat guy. He took another look at my hat while he was cleaning them. “Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,” he said. “That’s a deer shooting hat.”
“Like hell it is.” I took it off and looked at it. I sort of closed one eye, like I was taking aim at it. “This is a people shooting hat,” I said. “I shoot people in this hat.”

Also, I didn’t know Chinese Democracy had a song called Catcher in the Rye, did you?

The Omnivoracious blog on Amazon compared their year end top 100 books list, with the New York Times 100 Notable Books and Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2009 to get a composite of the best books of 2009. There were 11 books that were on all 3 lists this year, plus 2 that were not on the Notable 100, but were on other NY Times lists. For what it’s worth, there were 13 last year and 11 in 2007. No women authors made the cut, only 2 novels, and 2 graphic novels.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Born Round by Frank Bruni
Cheever by Blake Bailey
Columbine by Dave Cullen
Fordlandia by Greg Grandin
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
Momofuku by David Chang and Peter Meehan (not in NYT’s 100 Notable, but in their best cookbooks list)
The Jazz Loft Project by Sam Stephenson (not in NYT’s 100 Notable, but in their Gift Books list)

Hearing how Chuck Klosterman’s voice sounds on Bill Simmons’ podcasts makes it a little more awesome to read this book. I thought the premise tying this book together was unnecessary, as Spin could have just sent Klosterman on a road trip. It’s worth reading even if I don’t know whether to pronounce Klosterman as Close-terman or Claws-terman.

I would have never started reading Maureen Tkacik’s Gladwell for Dummies in The Nation if I had known that it was over 8K words, so, you know, be warned. And yet it has an “irritating, unrelenting readability” that kept bringing me back to it over several hours. While Anti-Gladwellian screed might be too strong of a descriptor, I’d be comfortable throwing around phrases like petty and jealously thorough. Profiles like this don’t get written without there being some sort of personal vendetta involved. And yet, while it’s a devastating look at Gladwell’s work, it also functions as a takedown of those who enjoy his books. The title of the article should not have been “Gladwell for Dummies” (that would have been better lampooned as “Pseudoscience for Airplanes”), but “Gladwell is for Dummies”. Maureen, you make me feel dumb for having read Gladwell’s articles, what SHOULD I read?

That success is in the eye of the unsuccessful would seem to be the great unspoken dilemma dogging critics asked to consider the work of the rich and famous author and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell. No matter how well intentioned or intellectually honest their attempts to assess his ideas, the subtext of Gladwell’s perceived success, and its implications for their own aspirations in the competitive thought-generation business, obscures their judgment and sinks their morale. Nearly a decade has passed since the New York Times dryly summarized Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), as “a study of social epidemics, otherwise known as fads,” and yet, each Sunday, it still taunts perusers of the paperback nonfiction rankings, where it currently sits in sixth place. Gladwell may be merely “a slickster trickster” who “markets marketing” (as James Wolcott put it), or a “clever idea packager” who “cannot conceal the fatuousness of his core conclusions” (science writer John Horgan); he might even be an “idiot” (Leon Wieseltier). But one thing is clear: Gladwell is no fad. He is a brand, a guru, a fixture at New York publishing parties and in the spiels of literary agents hoping to steer writers toward concepts that will strike publishers as “Gladwellian.”

Via Fimoculous

This was a great collection of short stories. Although the stories all had different plots, there were strong themes tying them all together. I liked the first story and those towards the end.

I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s piece about eating meat in the NYTimes Magazine’s Food Issue and didn’t quite get it. The title was clear, “Why Jonathan Safran Foer Chose to Give Up Meat”, but that didn’t seem to be what the column was about. Admittedly, I skimmed the whole thing, but my sense was that Foer had given up meat several times (every other paragraph, it seemed) and that he had settled on eating it once in a while, but not serving it to his kids. Frankly, the column seemed jumbled and stupid [POT! KETTLE!], an attempt to get a famous writer to talk about their personal psychic struggle with eating meat. So I giggled a little at Bookslut’s take on Foer’s latest book, Eating Animals:

I am trying so hard to be nice to Jonathan Safran Foer, by which I mean I am trying to forget he exists on this planet. His book Eating Animals, however, is making this goal very, very difficult. It was bad enough when he was writing shitty novels, but now he’s indulging in my least favorite form of nonfiction: the “I have never thought about this thing before until now, and despite the fact that other people have thought about this for years and wrestle daily with the implications, I think my brand new thoughts should be shared with the world.” Whatever the topic — religion, marriage, gender, food politics — the books are always shallow, yet for some reason a lot of people take them seriously.

Via my blogbuddy, who got it from Prettier Than Napoleon who said accurately:

The proper place for deep thoughts on issues that you just started examining but which have already been exhaustively discussed by more informed people is a blog. GYOFB, Jonathan Safran Foer.

Bill Simmons’ new book, The Book of Basketball, came out this week. ESPN celebrated by posting 5 excerpts from the book. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Chuck Klosterman has a new book coming out today, Eating the Dinosaur. Here are a couple interviews, from the Wall St Journal and the Washington Post. As a bonus, here’s a review he did about a baseball book.