First, via Bookish, Livio De Marchi's house made of books. We saw some of the wooden items within the house--the clothing in the amoire-- in a storefront in Amsterdam last summer.
Edward Rothstein explains the political and social reality behind the authorial allusions in Don Quixote--why it would have been impossible for an original Arabic version of the novel to have ever existed in Spain at the time Cervantes was writing. (New York Times)
Those who don't enjoy the occasional ramble through Bartlett's
Quotations may quickly lose patience with Queen Loana,
but bookworms will get an added kick out of puzzling out the dozens of literary
allusions. Even more than Eco's The Name of the Rose, his new
novel 'is a tale of books.' It's probably illegal to write a book about memory
without referencing Marcel Proust and his crumbly cookie, but Eco is just as
erudite about Mandrake the Magician.
Yvonne Zipp whets my appetite with her review of Eco's latest.
And there are three reviews of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian to turn to: Colleen Mondoor at Bookslut loves it; Janet Maslin horrifyingly reveals a preference for Dan Brown's skill at writing suspense; and Jon Fasman says there's ultimately too little danger at the heart of the novel . Funny, I was reading the reviews of Dracula at Amazon last night, and someone made the same complaint of it.
And Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days still continues to get tepid reviews, the latest by Michiko Kakutani.
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