Weekend books.

As fictioneer, [Woody] Allen has the ear of a comedian and the erudition of a Carnegie Deli waiter with a PhD in European literature. An accusation, incidentally, no one ever laid at the feet of Henry James. Read every story in Mere Anarchy. Then plow through The Insanity Defense, which collects, in one volume, the holy trinity of Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975) and Side Effects (1980). If you're genetically susceptible, such total immersion can trigger the primal Hebraic fun-pain synapse: the mortifying, zombie-like urge to try to write like Woody Allen. The result is not just the awareness that he's Woody Allen and you never will be, but also a compulsive urge to use the word "herring" in every document - not to mention a dawning awareness of how many times Allen himself uses the same words over and over.

Mike reads Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959 - 1971, "a collection of bits from filmmaker Jonas Mekas's column for the Village Voice... long out of print and, as far as I can tell, hasn't been reprinted since it's 1972 edition.... Some publisher seriously needs to dust this thing off and get it out there again. It's that important."

Hadley Freeman: "After an interval of almost 20 years since the last Tales of the City book, Sure of You, [Armistead] Maupin's new novel, Michael Tolliver Lives, is published on June 18."

Also in the Guardian Review this week: Jenny Diski on Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Steven Poole on Haruki Murakami's After Dark, Christopher Hope on Dave Eggers's What is the What and Louise Welsh:

We can no longer read Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the state of excitement described by a contemporary reviewer in the Times as "passing from surprise to surprise in a curiosity that keeps growing, because it is never satisfied." Morally opposed, mortally linked, the inspiration for movies, ballets, plays, operas, cartoons and sculptures, their names have been given to moody workmates and mild-mannered killers. It's difficult for the modern reader to remember that the nature of the bond between the good doctor and his alter ego isn't revealed until the second to last chapter of the book. So is there any point in reading the novel at all? Oh yes, most definitely.

Posted by dwhudson at June 9, 2007 6:50 AM