After working nearly 40 hours over the weekend, including all night Sunday, we finally finished a substantial part of the work that has kept me from my family and from this blog. I will have substantially more time! To ease back into things, a simple announcement everyone has probably already heard by now anyway: the NBCC finalists have been announced.<\/p>\n
Fiction<\/strong><\/p>\n Nonfiction<\/strong><\/p>\n Autobiography<\/strong><\/p>\n Biography<\/strong><\/p>\n Criticism<\/strong><\/p>\n Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n Of the fiction, I have read only Teju Cole’s Open City<\/em>, which I liked a great deal, though I have yet to review it here. I began The Stranger’s Child<\/em> and simply wasn’t enjoying it enough to finish — and I don’t feel now that I should go back and try again. I have both The Marriage Plot<\/em> and Binnocular Vision<\/em>, and my plan for the last six months has been to read those, but other things keep jumping up the line. Soon, perhaps.<\/p>\n For the nonfiction, I have read many of the essays in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead<\/em> that were published (perhaps in different form) in a variety of magazines and journals over the past few years. I think he’s an exceptional writer and a great essayist. This one goes highly recommended.<\/p>\n Then I have to skip down to criticism before I have anything else to say, and that is that I have read the title essay to Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture<\/em> and found it delightful and funny. I will review that book here when I get through more of the essays.<\/p>\n\n
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