This won the Booker Prize. And I was surprised. Because this is the first time I’ve ever read one of the winning books before it was anointed. Furthermore, I usually find the winning books close to unreadable. They titillate the committee, academics, but they are not for the proletariat. But “Flesh”? At first I couldn’t […]

“Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu”: https://bit.ly/488Y0yH   Literally. This book made me feel inadequate, like I hadn’t lived life to the fullest. Thank god I still have some time left, but I could never catch up. Now I know Tom Freston. I even know the outline of most of these stories, a bit of […]

I started reading the new Pynchon book. It got good reviews and I love him in principle, he’s disconnected, he’s a writer, he doesn’t need the penumbra, the media profile. Then again, I bought “Gravity’s Rainbow” and never made much headway, never mind “The Crying of Lot 49.” So I’d just finished this book “The […]

Peter Guralnick has written the definitive Elvis Presley books, “Last Train to Memphis” and “Careless Love.” His latest is about Elvis’s manager, “The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World.”  Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/peter-guralnick/id1316200737?i=1000733121871 https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/40a99a83-89d4-4894-9e39-c02fb6dac5c1/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-peter-guralnick