Category Archives: Books

Comics as Literature

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & ClayRight now I’m halfway through Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” which is the first fiction I’ve read in about a year. A friend gave it to me as a gift two years ago, but I only picked it up recently. It’s a good read and ambitious in scope, if a little over-rated. What makes it so entertaining is the very grown-up eye it turns to the comic book world, a kind of validation of the wide-eyed passion of geeky, power-starved, adolescent boys everywhere.

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Lewis’s “Next” and First

Liar’s PokerJust back from California. On the flight out, I devoured Michael Lewis’s “Next: The Future Just Happened,” the follow-up to his wildly popular “The New New Thing.” Though not as epic as its predecessor, “Next” was terrific, a keen survey of social change in the post-Net age. Lewis convinced me that he is a truly gifted chronicler of eras, and while in San Francisco, I eagerly hunted down a copy of his first book, “Liar’s Poker,” a less polished yet thoroughly engaging recreation of the bond trading business during the heady Eighties.

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Silver Fox

Hawks on HawksWay back in March when I returned to New York from my stint overseas, a friend of mine loaned me “Hawks on Hawks” by Joseph McBride, a book-length collection of interviews with Howard Hawks, who’s probably my all-time favorite director. It’s hard not to have a macho kind of respect for a director that spins these kinds of tales to his biographer.
On the subject of a dispute he once had with Howard Hughes over a scene in Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels,” Hawks said: “So he got his writer to go to my secretary and offer her two hundred dollars for the script. She told me about it and I had a couple of detectives hiding in her closet. When the guy offered her the money, they said, ‘You’re under arrest.’ Hughes called me and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got that writer of mine in jail.’ And I said, ‘You son of a bitch, he’ll stay there.’”

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On the Night Table

This morning I finished Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” which holds up as a snapshot of the decadent Eighties. I’ve since made it thirty pages into Lorrie Moore’s “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” a stunningly well-written remembrance of a childhood friendship. Next on the list is Joseph McBride’s book-length interview with Howard Hawks, titled (logically enough) “Hawks on Hawks,” loaned to me by a friend.

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A List of Things I Consumed

This is a little late, but in December, the lists came out—‘best of’ lists, what’s in and what’s out lists, lists of New Year’s resolutions etc. So I figured, what the heck, I may as well make a list. I mean, that’s kind of what Internet content is all about— realizing the compulsion to express an opinion, regardless of intrinsic value — right?

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