A few months ago, we rounded up some of the strangest day jobs of beloved authors had before they were famous — and in the process discovered that William S. Burroughs was once an exterminator in Chicago, William Faulkner served as the postmaster at Ole Miss, and John Steinbeck ran a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe. Today, we discovered that if Joan Didion had possessed the necessary science credits, she would have preferred to probe the depths of the ocean as opposed to those of the human psyche.
“I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually,” she reveals to Sheila Heti in in the February issue of The Believer. “And when I was out of school and living in New York and working for a magazine, I actually went out to the Scripps Institute, which is now UC San Diego, but then it was just the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, run by the University of California, and I asked them what I would have to do to become an oceanographer. And basically they said I would have to go back to high school, you know. I hadn’t taken any of the science courses that would enable me to take the science courses that I would need to take in order to go to… any place. So I abandoned the idea of being an oceanographer, but I can see myself still as an oceanographer, if I could get to that point.”
So, in case it ever comes up, now you know the one thing that Joan Didion has in common with 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy.
More and more memoirs seem to come out every year — a product, perhaps, in our unslakable interest in the human condition — but as far as we’re concerned, 2011 was a particularly great one. We had actually wonderful celebrity memoirs, unusual and experimental prose, and particular standouts in the traditional memoir fields of family history and tragedy. Click through to read about our favorite memoirs of the year, and since we can’t possibly have read all the great ones out there, be sure to chime in with your own picks in the comments. One note: the last entry on the list — a really fantastic book — may be slightly NSFW. Proceed with caution.
It’s the end of the year, which means every media outlet and talkative friend has been regaling you with a fascinating list of their own personal favorite books of 2011. Now, we love lists as much as the next guy, but we also like to think a little bit about what these highly subjective choices might say about the listmaker. After all, you wouldn’t take reading advice from just anybody, now would you? Or even if you would, you should at least know what essential qualities their picks point to. Click through to read our (decidedly tongue-in-cheek) breakdown of what your favorite book of the year says about you, and in case you were wondering, our pick is on here too, and hey, we can cop to it. Read More »
There’s nothing like a well-stocked library to enhance a home. Especially when that library has been outfitted with books chosen by some of the choosiest readers of all — the authors themselves. We recently caught a peek at the literary collections of a few contemporary novelists in Leah Price’s excellent and newly released Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, but we admit that our library-lust wasn’t quite sated, and we had to go hunting for more. We’ve already shown you a choice selection of the libraries of the rich and famous, but here, inspired by Price’s book, we’re focusing on the libraries, studies, and carefully organized bookshelves of the authors themselves. Click through to see a few snapshots of the libraries of famous authors, and let us know which ones inspire you to curl up and read in the comments. Read More »
Earlier this week, The New York Times published their annual list of 100 Notable Books, just in time for the holidays. While we can’t deny that every book on the list is a great pick, 100 is a pretty big number, so in case you don’t have the time or eye-strength to plow through their monster list, we’ve distilled it to the essentials, at least according to us. After all, while you probably don’t have 100 people on your holiday gift list, you probably do have 10, and you’ll find a little something for everybody here. Click through to see our favorites from their list, and let us know which of these you’re psyched to read — or which of the 100 you’d have chosen instead. Read More »
Ever wonder what your favorite book looked like when it was first published? While many classics — The Great Gatsby, Catch-22 — have retained their iconic, original covers over the years, others have changed with the times. As a follow up to last week’s roundup of famous magazines’ first covers, we’ve compiled 20 beautiful, surprising, or otherwise notable first covers of classic novels that we’d never seen before. See a surprisingly minimalist The Age of Innocence, a painful-looking The Sound and the Fury, the design that preceded A Clockwork Orange‘s famous ’70s cover, and many more, in chronological order after the jump. Read More »
Yesterday saw the release of Joan Didion’s newest memoir, Blue Nights. Didion is the master of the memoir, but more specifically, she is the master of the genre of the memoir of loss, of teaching us something through her exquisitely rendered grief, of sharing her family and heart. The book got us to thinking about other wonderful examples of memoirs in this genre, which just seems to get more and more popular, despite its inherent sadness, so we’ve compiled a list of a few of our favorites. Click through to see our list of our ten favorite memoirs about loss, and let us know your own favorites in the comments.
It’s the first of the month, and you know what that means: a brand new spate of new literary releases to delve into. Not that we mind — the weather’s getting brisker (not to mention those snowstorms, NYC), and we really can’t think of anything better to do than to curl up with a cup of hot cider and a great novel (or memoir, or book of essays, or short story collection). Don’t be put off by the number of big names on our list this month — we like a struggling first novel as much as the next blog, but November is the month for publishers to pull out their big guns, and boy have they ever. Click through to see our list of ten must-reads coming out this month, and let us know which books you’re most psyched to dig into in the comments.
If you are in any way witchy, or follow the equinoxes, then you will know that the 23rd marks the first official day of fall this year. We decided to jump the gun and present our fall books preview a day early, just because we can’t wait, and because we are in no way astrologically-inclined. The following pages feature seven works of fiction, one encyclopedia, one photo/interview book, a memoir, and (an invisible, but deeply felt) partridge in a pear tree. The best way to cope with the changing of the seasons is to confront them head on, you know, so put on a sweater, brew a hot beverage, and curl up with some of these books.
Today at Flavorpill, we wished that the world had more adorable skydiving grannies like 82-year-old birthday girl/lifelong daredevil Judy Wade. We discovered that Mad Men screenshots and Arrested Development dialogue go surprisingly well together. We couldn’t believe that ABC thinks that they can replace Roseanne Barr with the likes of Kirstie Alley. We supported public broadcasting by downloading a free mixtape of Anti- artists including Wilco, Tom Waits, Neko Case, Mavis Staples, and Dr. Dog. We liked Andy Rash’s 8-bit take on the cast of Breaking Bad. We wondered how long it took Bronx Zoo staffers to assemble these life-sized LEGO versions of various wild animals. We decided that Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” definitely needs the gyrating Courtney Cox after watching the original video. We were excited to read that Norman Mailer’s son wants to direct Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s screenplay adaptation of his father’s novel The Deer Park. We found out which New York City kitchens are literally the hottest. And finally, we got a good chuckle out of this flowchart that details the do’s and don’ts of being mad on the Internet.
