Good things

at the NYTBR this week.

Liesl Schillinger has a great piece about the new Pynchon novel (which I've got, and am supposed to read soon, but this is perhaps the first review I've read that really gives me the fortitude to tackle it--aside from everything else I am perplexed and amused by the way it sounds so much like MY novel--dynamite, science and technology, secret history of an alternate twentieth century--only I have resolutely held out against airships, I like airships of course [who doesn't?] but there is a veritable airship craze right now, possibly sparked by Philip Pullman but maybe just one of those zeitgeisty things--certainly reading Gravity's Rainbow was one of the great events of my adolescence, another thing for which I can thank the demented Anthony Burgess 99 Novels book which was like my secret guru when I was fifteen and sixteen).

Also: Hitchens on Vidal; and Deborah Blum on Dale Peterson's Jane Goodall biography (which I am SO going to read over Xmas break, I think I've got an advance copy floating around here somewhere, must go and check and put it in some conspicuous spot along with the couple other things I most want to read but can't get to till school's over).