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Chad's 2013 Books
As I mentioned in an earlier post—or two—I ended up reading 111 books last year. A lot of South Korean titles—as part of my judging their biannual translation contest—and a random assortment of other things, both that Open Letter is publishing, or that I wanted to review/think might be BTBA longlist ...
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Three Percent #67: The Tom Podcast
From the choice of the opening song—“Royals” by Lorde—to the main topic of great midwestern bookstores and Wisconsin’s beer culture, this podcast is All About Tom. And it’s fantastic. Mostly because we get to talk about a lot of great bookstores. Some of the stores mentioned in this ...
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Let's Capitalize on the Garth Risk Hallberg Thing for a Post
If you’re into book industry news and whatnot, you’ve probably heard the story about Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel, City on Fire. Just to recap though, before the book had a publisher, Scott Rudin, the movie producer behind Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and No Country ...
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Three Percent #66: I Believe You Have My Stapler
On this week’s podcast, Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times joined us to discuss Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge. All three of us are Pynchon fans, and all three of us really liked this latest book. Although, as we talk about, the fact that we experienced a lot of the cultural items Pynchon ...
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Three Percent #65: Erudition Isn't the Same as Being Intentionally Esoteric
This week’s podcast is the first one Tom and I have recorded in almost a month. So after a bit of catching up, we talked about David Bellos’s new translation of Simenon’s Pietr the Latvian, the difficulties of translating “I love you” and all the swears into Japanese, and this list of “The ...
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Three Percent #64: Thanks for Using All the Umlauts
With Tom back from his relaxing vacation, we decided to catch up and talk about the books we read recently, including Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s mystery series, Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Sound of Things Falling, and Rafael Bernal’s The Mongolian Conspiracy, among others. We also talk about Amazon’s ...
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Three Percent #63: Spermatic Economy
This week’s podcast is a special combo version featuring two separate conversations: one between Chad, Stephen Sparks (BTBA judge, Green Apple bookseller, and excellent reviewers), and George Carroll; and one between Chad and Paul Yamazaki (legendary City Lights bookseller). Topics range from soccer to Karl Pohrt to ...
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