Archive for May, 2007

Monthly 20,000-book bonfires

A bookstore owner whose books were rejected by libraries and thrift stores is burning his overstock to protest “diminishing support for the printed word.”

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Summer reading at Talk of the Nation

ZZ Packer, Laura Miller, and I will be on Talk of the Nation this afternoon for a segment devoted to summer reading. I don’t naturally think of books in terms of seasons, but in the past few years I’ve realized that my most manic reading experiences tend to happen in warm weather. See, e.g., Books that make you stand at . . .

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Postcard: Aunt Alma and the new puppies

  Until all this family memorabilia came my way, I didn’t know that many picture postcards sent in the early 1900s were photos of people’s relatives. Last week’s shot of a scowling Martha Caroline and her barefoot granddaughters is an example, though it wasn’t actually mailed. Here’s a cheerier one, of Alma Kinchen, my great-grandmother, holding three puppies. She didn’t . . .

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In search of Greene’s Capri

Graham Greene said Capri “isn’t really my kind of place,” but he kept a house there for 40 years because “in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.”

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