December appearances online and elsewhere

Delighted to have been asked to write a short guest post on 2009 in review for the BookNet Canada blog.

I also got a contribute some short recommendations for the wonderful folks at the Advent Book Blog.

Finally, the Oxford American's 2009 music issue is still on the stands, and it is a fine piece of reading, coming this year with no less than two CDs. It is, as usual, a fine list of contributors, among whose august company I was thrilled to pen a short piece on Memphis Slim's "No Mail Blues".

Vacation Reading

This year's absurdly ambitious (as ever) vacation reading stack:

The themes:

• Dystopia
• Love
• Music

And my obligatory Summer mainstays:

• Modern Library editions (double book score for the Ellison on music)
• At least one John McPhee
• At least one Western
• At least one Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• At least one YA lit (double book score for Anderson's dystopian Feed)

I look forward to reading perhaps 30% of these and the other books that I will doubtless pick up along the way. On that note: not pictured is Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, acquired mid-journey.