Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Old New Yorkers

I can't decide what to do with all of my old copies of the New Yorker now that I have the Complete New Yorker on DVD. I know I should get rid of them. I'm thinking it would be fun to save the covers and buy a hundred frames and make a wall of New Yorker covers. I know someone who did that a long time ago. It could work for me. Or I could keep them. But I know its silly to hoarde them when I have them on DVD now. I always keep crap like this so to be able to even consider throwing out 15 years of the magazine is a major breakthrough on my part. And if I tossed them, I would gain an entire closet.

More Ross Thomas books are coming in the mail each day. I got The Porkchoppers today. I read the back cover and thought it sounded stupid. When I read the first chapter at lunch, I was delighted to find that its a wonderful book. I think Thomas was cursed by bad book design. My copy of The Money Harvest has the world's worst cover. I can't find a picture of it anywhere (and there's no info on who did the art or the design - but this guy did a lot of bad stuff in the 60s and 70s). Its all red with tacky paitings (unintentional caricatures most likely) of what the artist considers dangerous/glamorous/seductive rich people lounging about. The book is so ugly that I'm a bit embarrassed to be seen reading it. If I saw someone read a book this ugly (without knowing what it was) I'd think the person was a complete loser. But its a wonderful book. There's no way to reconcile the awfulness of the cover and the nearly perfect writing inside the book. One other thing - it is set in Washington, DC - more or less in my neighborhood, too.

I ordered Michael Connelly's new book, The Lincoln Lawyer, today. And a paperback copy of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. And I picked up Stephen King's new book, The Colorado Kid. I am not much of a King fan (of King the writer - I'm a huge fan of King the person/humanitarian) but the new book is a paperback original meant to look like a 1950s pulp novel. And its short (by his standards) so I figure its a low risk proposition.