Monday, March 28, 2005

Books and birds

Thomas Mallon doesn't much like Geraldine Brooks' March (NY Times), which arrived in a package for me on Saturday (along with the soundtrack from Deadwood), and there's been a pretty even split between the novel's early readers at Readerville, with people whose opinions I respect on either side of the divide. After reading Brooks' New Yorker article on Bronson Alcott, I don't think encountering modern sensibilities in the main characters, which has been the main complaint, will faze me one bit. The Mallon review would carry more weight if I'd ever been able to make it through one of his novels. Nonetheless I'm waiting another week before starting March--I turned to Patrick O'Brian again after finishing my reread of As I Lay Dying last night.

Katharine Weber, whose The Little Women was also inspired by Lousia May's novel, is working on a novel based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. An excerpt of the novel can be read online (Hartford Courant).

E.L. Doctorow discusses the narrative strategies in the book of Genesis (Guardian) as he compares the new English Revised Bible to the King James version.

And it has nothing to do with books, but I've just discovered the 10,000 Birds site. A new bird, a sulfur-breasted parakeet, has been discovered. It looks like a sun conure, or even the extinct Carolina parakeet, to my untrained eye. Way cool, I think.

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