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Laura Miller talks to Daniel Mendelsohn about the ethics of the negative review.

I have a very slight cold and (unrelatedly) got barely any sleep last night, but on the other hand I got several important errands done today, including one I was slightly dreading (taking 'new' used bike and case down to Sid's Bikes on the subway for them to pack it up for Saturday travel - my aversion to traveling on the subway with cumbersome things is sufficient that I went so far as to read the packing instructions and contemplate undertaking the disassembly project myself, before coming to my senses and deciding it had better be left to the professionals!).

Almost finished with the first volume of My Struggle. It is curiously and inexplicably mesmerizing, like the charismatic teenage love child of Proust and Thomas Bernhard!

Wax off

The ten best personal trainers in film and television.

JM

At the FT (site registration required), an interesting long essay by Hedley Twidle on his Coetzee fixation:

Since Coetzee lodged his manuscripts in Harvard and now Texas, we have learnt that he wrote his major novels almost entirely in University of Cape Town examination books. They have dull orange covers with instructions printed on them: “Peak caps to be reversed”; “Answer only ONE question per booklet”.

Sliced!

It is hard for me to imagine anything more delicious-looking than this slice of cake.

Deuces wild

Phillip Dyess-Nugent on Django Unchained and David Bromwich on Spielberg's Lincoln.

2012 round-up

Trawled back through the blog earlier for reading recommendations from 2012. Too lazy to post in links: it's much, much easier for me just to list! Here are some thoughts, anyway. If it's here, it's something I'm actively recommending as worth your time and likely to elicit considerable enjoyment.

Favorite new read: Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, including At Last.

Strongest other recommendations: David Gordon, The Serialist; Lavie Tidhar, Osama.

Favorite (only!) new book of poetry, also an all-round favorite: Jane Yeh, The Ninjas.

Favorite nonfiction: Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

Slightly under the radar, and absolutely beautifully written: Alan Warner, The Deadman's Pedal.

Novel I most surprised myself by thoroughly enjoying: Ernest Cline, Ready Player One.

Most startlingly unusual new read: Heath Lowrance, The Bastard Hand.

Favorite literary fiction: Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers; Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?; Victor La Valle, The Devil in Silver; Ellen Ullman, By Blood. Three also quite literary and very good that I would group together in a single category: Joshilyn Jackson, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty; Lauren Groff, Arcadia; Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine.

Between literary and genre fiction: J. Robert Lennon, Familiar.

Three books of the outdoors I liked very much: Colleen Mondor, Map of My Dead Pilots; Will Chaffey, Swimming with Crocodiles; Cheryl Strayed, Wild.

Vaguely supernatural and humorous: Daniel O'Malley, The Rook; Ben Aaronovich's occult London series; Christa Faust, Coyote's Kiss; and M. H. Van Keuren's debut Rhubarb. Supernatural and less humorous: Chuck Wendig, Blackbirds.

Favorite zombie novel (I think!): S. G. Browne, Breathers: A Zombie's Lament. Mira Grant's final Newsflesh installment also very good, as were the novels of hers I read under the Seanan McGuire byline.

Favorite presidential vampire novel: Christopher Farnsworth, Blood Oath.

Favorite paranormal romance: Lilia Ford, The Heartwood Box.

My favorite crime read of the year was Tana French's Broken Harbor, and it prompted me to reread her three earlier books with strong pangs that there aren't more of them.

Other crime fiction of excellence: Deon Meyer, Seven Days; Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (I am not quite the evangelist for this book that others seem to be, I liked at least a dozen other crime novels better, but it is undoubtedly very good); Alan Glynn, Bloodland; Harriet Lane, Alys, Always; Martyn Waites, Born Under Punches; Johan Theorin, The Darkest Room and Echoes from the Dead; Attica Locke, Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season; Tom Piccirilli, The Last Kind Words; Jorin Lieder Horst, Dregs; John Rector, Already Gone; Anya Lipska, Where the Devil Can't Go; and a couple co-authored crime novels whose authors' names I am too lazy to look up: The Eyes of Lira Kazan, Three Seconds and Invisible Murder.

Megan Abbott's superb Dare Me led me to Rebecca Godfrey's wonderful Under the Bridge.

I hugely enjoyed new books from Lee Child, Karin Slaughter, Taylor Stevens, Mo Hayder, Rosamond Lupton, Mark Billingham, Charlie Williams, Arnaldur Indridason and Liza Marklund.

Books in different genres from one another (science fiction and crime respectively) but lodged in my mind as a couple as they are engaged with some related issues: Kameron Hurley, God's War; Anthony Neil Smith, All the Young Warriors.

And should I count Hilary Mantel's Bringing Up the Bodies under this heading? (I would recommend Mantel instead of George R. R. Martin, if you're not sure about whether to read the Game of Thrones books, although I did quite enjoy the latest installment.)

Two nonfiction books that made a significant impression on me: Tim Parks, On Trying to Sit Still; Gideon Lewis-Kraus, A Sense of Direction.

Other nonfiction: Sarah Manguso, The Guardians; Ben Anastas, Too Good to Be True; Marco Roth, The Scientists; Maureen McLane, My Poets; Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations.

Cycling-related: David Millar, Racing Through the Dark; Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race. Also, Benjamin Lorr's Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain and the Search for Something Like Transcendence Through Competitive Yoga; and Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies, which I wished I hadn't read on a Kindle.

I didn't read very much YA fiction this year, but I thoroughly enjoyed Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan's collaboration Teen Human and Gwenda Bond's Blackwood. Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze is a wonderful book, highly recommended to a wide range of readers; the same goes for Terry Pratchett's Dodger, though it is less original than Sherman's (and also gave me a yen to reread Philip Pullman's 19th-century London trilogy). Laini Taylor's Days of Blood and Starlight is irresistible!

Much reading and rereading of Diana Wynne Jones, not all of it noted here. Other significant rereads: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty; Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age; Victor Nell, Lost in a Book; Middlemarch; The Hobbit; and the selected works of Lee Child.

Favorite theater: These Seven Sicknesses and Restoration Comedy at the Flea. The Ring Cycle made quite an impression on me, as for that matter did the Ades adaptation of The Tempest, but my favorite opera by far was the ravishing Einstein on the Beach at BAM. While I binged on House and The Good Wife, my favorite television-watching experience involved a truly charming and short-lived older series called Wonderfalls. Favorite movie: Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Here's to an even better year of reading and spectatorship in 2013!

Catch-up

Finally having a quiet morning at home, though I must confess that I feel flat and dispirited rather than relieved. It is probably just accumulated fatigue; I am hoping that another couple days of relative peace and quiet will make a positive difference.

Minor light reading around the edges (jury duty and holiday travels both entail lots of time for novel-reading): Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground (these books just get better and better as the series progresses); a few last lingering books by Diana Wynne Jones that I hadn't yet read and that are now available for Kindle (I really like her books more than almost anything else I can think of), Power of Three and The Homeward Bounders and a collection of stories called Believing is Seeing; Matthew J. Kirby's Icefall (implausibly modern heroine, but very nice otherwise); Terry Pratchett's delightful Dodger (probably inferior from a literary point of view to Leon Garfield's Dickensian children's books, but much more lovely to read - those are incredibly dispiriting); Tom Piccirilli's The Last Kind Words, which I enjoyed a good deal but which is very strangely reminiscent of Holly Black's superficially entirely different Curse Workers series; Attica Locke's The Cutting Season (even better than her first one); Christopher Farnsworth's Blood Oath, which I thoroughly enjoyed (presidential vampires!); and William Landay's Defending Jacob.

Also read two non-electronic books at my mother's over Xmas: a copy of Noel Streatfeild's Traveling Shoes, which my mom obtained at a used book sale, and Garry Disher's Whispering Death, borrowed from the public library, which I thought was quite reasonable.

Having completely rotted my brain by reading too many undemanding novels over the past couple weeks (not to mention the candy!), my only plan for the rest of the week is to indulge in vast quantities of exercise and read this.

I also need to look back through the year's blog posts so that I can write an end-of-year round-up....

Cats in the news

Controversy surrounding federal attempts to regulate cats at the Hemingway Museum in Key West:

The dispute began in 2003 after a museum volunteer and cat lover filed a complaint with the department after an aggressive cat wandered from the property. The agency concluded that the museum needed to follow federal regulations on exhibiting animals. But the museum argued that the cats are born and bred at the house, that they seldom wander beyond the grounds and that it is Mr. Hemingway’s legacy — not the cats — that serve as the main attraction.

“If we had a six-toed cat zoo, we wouldn’t get those numbers,” Ms. Higgins said.

But the agency disagreed. It sent in an animal behavioral specialist to index the cats and analyze the situation. Undercover agents were then sent in 2005 and 2006 to observe the cats and surreptitiously photograph their movements. One photo shows a gray cat sitting on the pavement. It carries the caption: “Picture of six-toed cat taken in restaurant/bar at end of Whalton Lane and Duval. May or may not be a Hemingway Home and Museum cat.”

Widow's walk

Susan Cooper profiled at the Guardian.

Loss

Gutted to wake up this morning to an email from longtime correspondent Dave Lull to let me know that Maxine Clarke has died. Petrona has been one of my favorite blogs for as long as I can remember. I only met Maxine once - we had a delightful lunch at the British Library in St. Pancras - but our emails and comments flew back and forth across the Atlantic like you would not believe. This tribute takes the words out of my mouth. What a lovely person she was, in every way: kind, humane, generous, incredibly bright and unassuming. An inconsequential detail: when we talked about my "breeding" book, she revealed that her grandfather was the agronomist who bred the particular strain of wheat used to make Weetabix!

Just a note

to observe that I was released from jury duty at the end of the day - they kept the four of us who were alternates in a separate room for the afternoon, but though deliberations hadn't finished, they let us go regardless. Too tired for true celebration to be in order, but I am incredibly happy that I can spend tomorrow luxuriously at Chelsea Piers - and finally get back to end-of-semester grading responsibilities!

Galleys!

"Doomfully o'erhung"

Best description ever of what it feels like to be working on a book.

Also: turnspit dogs....

Aerialism

Tom Keymer on Samuel Johnson and ballooning.

I've had this one bookmarked for some days: it's appealing to me in its own right, because I love Samuel Johnson and I also love the early history of ballooning, but it also caused me to think very intensely of Wendy, who would have turned fifty-three today.

Wendy had cherished for many years a plan to have breakfast near Tiffany's, namely an expedition to the famous Manhattan jewelry emporium! There we saw, among an inconceivable array of wonders, one very lovely piece of jewelry that has stuck with me. I will quote from Wendy's own description of it, because she had a precision of observation and notation that I cannot command when it comes to such things: "A pear shaped peacock tahitian mounted upside down inside a gold netted framework — it was a hot air balloon pendant." It really was extraordinary - it was the most delicate and beautiful thing, very much in the spirit of the Faberge eggs which are the only jeweled thing I could say I actually have an emotional relationship with (they, too, represent a twentieth-century reimagining of an eighteenth-century tradition), and powerfully evoked that strange science-fictional spirit of early aerialism.

Data covered in cats

Twitter account details plotlines from unaired Season 8 of Star Trek: TNG. (Via Brent.)

NB this is clearly written out of same impulse that prompted the only short story I've written in adulthood! I should write another one like this sometime - many life stress problems would be largely solved if I could write shorter pieces instead of books primarily!