Started reading A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial by H.L. Mencken.

Started on The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis after reading some good reviews. Superb, and where has this writer been all these years?

Most of the time, yes.

New Michael Lewis book released Monday, called Flash Boys. So excited!

I may give it a shot, especially since Joyce, Flann O'Brien, and Gilbert Sorrentino are among my favorite writers, and this doesn't sound a million miles away from them.

This year's Tournament of Books has wrapped up. James McBride, The Good Lord Bird is the winner. It also won the National Book Award.

One of the more argued-about finalists was The Goldfinch, which I'm halfway through as of this morning.

The Luminaries started off really good, but somehow sort of ebbed away by the end to feel entertaining but a bit insubstantial.

Sweet. I finished The New New Thing recently and his take on the aura, mentality, money, and creative destruction of Silicon Valley is better than anything I've read and the book was published in 1999! Lewis kills the creative nonfiction game and I'm really looking forward to this book

Also, currently reading Bark a short story collection by Lorrie Moore, whom I adore. Very good so far.

Also, Lewis is on 60 minutes tonight, promoting the book. Airs in a hour. (I know, lol 60 minutes)

Anyone ever read The Sword of Truth Series(11 novels/1 novella) by Terry Goodkind? I've never heard of it before and just stumbled across it on Wiki.

I'll be looking for something to read starting in May and was wondering if this would be worth checking out.

I wasn't a fan of the books, but I do adore the tv series based on it, The Legend of the Seeker, even if the show is wonderful in part because of how bad it is. One faction of villains uses what are CLEARLY rubber dildos to torture their prisoners.

I also read a few stories comparatively when Beginners was first published. My conclusion was the opposite: I believed the Lish edited versions were better. I went into a tailspin as a result, considering how highly I had rated Carver up until this point. The fact that Lish is portrayed as somewhat of a con man in biographical discourse adds to this dilemma. Might dip back into the stories too see whether I still have the same view.

My sense is that Lish was probably more huckster than con: a self-promoter for sure. Stories about his creative writing makes me think they would have been for most students (and I mean bad for them as people; emotionally disturbing). But my impressions is that he had the potential to be a brilliant editor -- and probably often was.

But whether he was right for Carver? Something to be debated certainly, but you can't ignore the fact that he was the editor of the stories that established Carver's reputation.

I don't think Lish's changes were always wrong. Sometimes he improved thing but sometimes not.

I thought the story called After the Denim and If It Please You was far better without Lish's extreme cutting. Carver tells me things that I can't possibly infer or imagine from the story that Lish changed it into. I don't think Carver used any extra words to convey what he wanted; cutting into that does nothing but damage.

There are some stories where Lish's cuts are improvements but, overall, I am impressed with how good Carver was without an editor's help.

Finished Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook.

Finished Beloved, it was cool. Definitely not what I expected; it's almost a ghost story and was a fairly enjoyable read for the most part. Any strong recommendations on other Morrison books? I've heard Beloved might not even be her best despite the Pulitzer.

Started on Wild Worlds, which is a collection of mediocre Alan Moore comics. The first collected story was with the Spawn character and was basically Moore trying to do one of those awful '90s comics for 13-15 year olds that was actually good. He succeeds in that it's a good job of being a bad '90s comic for 13-15 year olds.

Also started the screenplay for The Counselor by Cormac McCarthy (released as a book). The opening scene, which I disliked in the movie, comes off differently in the screenplay. I don't feel that the actors performed it in the way it was intended, and the scene suffers for it. I'm guessing the screenplay in general will be better than the film, although I still liked the film.

I'm intensely looking forward to reading Robert Caro's massive LBJ series despite having no prior interest in LBJ and only a vague idea of who he is. My problem is I'm a bit OCD and probably need to read The Power Broker first as Caro wrote it first. The problem with that is that my friend has a personal highlighted/annotated copy of it that he's shared with a lot of our friends (he strongly suspects that most of them probably just kinda browsed through and read his highlights rather than actually read the whole thing), so I need to read that copy rather than get it from the library. He doesn't live all that far but I don't see him that often. Such a stressful situation.

Finished both The Power of Habit and The Count of Monte Cristo. My opinion of the former only decreased over its final third. 3 stars.

Monte Cristo pretty much just kept getting better. I ready the last 150 pages or so in one sitting (12% on Kindle). 5/5, 10/10, whatever.

On Kindle I have started both Thinking Fast and Slow and Contact by Sagan.

My next audio-book is The Birth of Britain: A History of the English Speaking Peoples Vol. 1 by Churchill. Covers everything up to 1485.

I finished Billy Lynn Long Halftime Walk. It was very good.

I am now reading Night Watch and I am loving it.

The downside editors like Lish is that they feel they don't know when to let things stand. They feel like they haven't done their job if they don't make changes.

My favourites are Song of Solomon and Jazz, the first for the story and the second more for the style.

Which one?

Song of Solomon is only one I remember. I read another one in high school, but I can't remember which even when I look at the plot summaries.

I liked Song of Solomon all right.

I recently reread As I Lay Dying and still like it a lot. I wish I understood it better.

I am now tackling The Sound and the Fury. I think next up will be some Clifford the big red dog.

The Night Watch: Book One by Sergei Lukyanenko, translated by Andrew Blomfeld.

I read The Bluest Eye which, if I remember correctly, is her first book. I thought it was good, very lyrical writing style.

I still haven't watched Oprah's movie version of Beloved. It still boggles my mind that they made that book into a movie...I just don't see how they would be able to do it justice in film.

The Carver biography by Sklenicka devotes significant attention to him. There's little doubt that Lish was instrumental in Carver becoming a significant writer, ensuring, for instance, that he was published in magazines such as Esquire. I guess the issue is the point at which editing might be considered a form of authorial collaboration. For sure, Lish would never have come upon the initial ideas for the stories themselves---since he wasn't a down-and-out alcoholic and working class parent and thus wouldn't have possessed the sympathetic ear that Carver certainly possessed---but as a craftsman perhaps Lish was a hidden master. It always fascinated me that he wrote a textbook on grammar before he became an editor; also the fact that he fought so hard for recognition later in Carver's life does suggest that he may have felt like he was more an author than an editor (although there was a significant financial incentive to making this claim).

I haven't read them all closely enough, on a comparative basis, that is, but I can see what you're saying here. Some have been reduced by over 50%, others by far less, so it's probably best to assess them case-by-case. Much of the difficulty is that the Lish versions are imprinted in my memory as ideal examples of the modern short story: so it's inevitable, and, somewhat ironic, that I approach the original Carver versions with a negative bias. For me, it would seem that, ultimately, Carver was attached to the subject matter, and Lish to the style. In my mind, Lish can therefore lay some claim to the Carver sentence, and the author perhaps has greater claim to the stories and characters themselves (particularly as they are to a large extent autobiographical).