My #fridayreads are kind of amazing this week. I’m reading Patrick Somerville’s This Bright River, because I’ve been dying to find out who gets bonked in the head—plus, when you read it, you will be reminded of how much you really love CSNY; Mary Jo Bang’s crazy translation of Inferno, because it’s great and I want to actually finish a Rumpus Poetry Book Club book in the month that it drops; Robert Louis Stevenson’s Apology for Idlers because Stevenson is my new Scottish god (replacing Roddy Frame); eventually I’ll get around to his The Beach of Falesá for the same reason; Hitchens’s piece on Orwell in the Vanity Fair; everything in the new Believer; and this great postcard that I got in response to my Letter to Each Other. Not pictured: Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, which I’m listening to because I love his adenoidal delivery and the weird way he says “rahther” as if he’s a Brit or an old-timey New England Yankee.
