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Books

Bedside Book Snooping: Photos of Our To-Read Piles

By Emily Temple on

Everyone always wants to know what everyone else is reading, in our experience — if only to get some good ideas for ourselves. This month, in lieu of our periodical staff reading list, we decided to take a more visual (and slightly more voyeuristic) route, and asked Flavorpill staffers to snap a photo of their to-read piles — or whatever pile of books happened to be haunting them. Apparently as a group, we enjoy books with Big Important Questions for titles (we found more than one instance of both Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and the galley of Wilhelm Reich’s Where’s the Truth?), but other than that, we span the spectrum of messy and neat, paperback-crazed and hardcover-happy, with everything from design magazines to biographies to the hot, slim new fiction release sleeping next to our heads. Click through to snoop through the piles of books in a few of your devoted Flavorpill staffers’ bedrooms, and then let us know what you own bedside table looks like in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 Quintessentially American Novels

By Emily Temple on

In case you missed all the cookouts and night-time explosions, yesterday was the fourth of July, and we hope you all spent it wearing red, white, and blue and eating hot dogs on a grassy lawn. We also hope you’re not too sick of American pride, however, because in honor of our country’s birthday, we’ve compiled a list of books that we think are quintessentially American to add to your reading list. Each of these books is wonderfully representative of some slice of the American experience, though of course no country can be the same for all people at all times. Click through to check out our ultra-patriotic reading list, and since a list of ten novels doesn’t even begin to cover it, let us know which books you’d add in the comments. … Read More

Books

10 Great Science Fiction Books for People Who Don’t Read Sci-Fi

By Emily Temple on

This week, The New Yorker published their first ever science fiction issue, filled with speculative stories from popular authors, many not necessarily known for their sci-fi writing: Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Lethem. In truth, we’re kind of amazed that it took The New Yorker this long to do a science fiction issue, but that doesn’t make us any less psyched to delve into it. However, we’ve heard more than one mutinous grumble from readers who don’t like — or think they don’t like — the genre, and consider this week’s issue a waste. In an attempt to convert them (though probably not before the next week’s issue comes out), we’ve put together this list of sci-fi books for people who don’t read sci-fi books. Whether you’re curious but not sure where to start or you’ve decided along the way that you just can’t stomach the stuff (read: you need to be tricked and cajoled), we have a book for you here, so click through and get to expanding your horizons. And hey, sci-fi buffs: be sure to add to our list in the comments! … Read More

Books

5 Recipes Inspired by Your Favorite Novels

By Emily Temple on

It’s pretty much a no-brainer why we love something like The Book Club Cookbook – it combines two of our all-time favorite things: food and books. Even better — the recipes in the book let us get a fuller experience of our favorite novels by thinking up recipes either inspired by the story or literally contributed by the author as essential to the book. We’ve excerpted five of our favorite recipes from the forthcoming updated edition of The Book Club Cookbook, which offers a host of recipes inspired by literature (as well as book club talking points, natch), including those below as well as others from novels like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Room, Jane Eyre, and even The Age of Innocence. Click through to read (and make!) a few of our favorite recipes, including commentary from the cookbook’s authors on both the book and the food. Bon Appetit! … Read More

Books

Required Reading for Your Quarter Life Crisis

By Emily Temple on

This week saw the release of Leigh Stein’s debut novel The Fallback Plan, a hilarious take on the post-college, self-absorbed, 20-something in existential crisis. We were pleased to see it, because in general, it seems like the 20s are a little bit of a dead area in fiction — there are hundreds of books about making it as a teenager (or even as a child prodigy) and hundreds more about grown-up issues and disaffected men in their 30s and 40s, but fewer about the post-college, pre-life choices period that many young Americans seem to be wallowing in these days. However, to give all you angsty 20-somethings in existential crisis mode something to read while you’re waiting out the weird years, we’ve created an absolutely required reading list, for bathtubs and bar stools alike. That’s right: you have homework, a little direction. Don’t you feel better? And hey, maybe you should read them while listening to these. Click through to fill your home-made bookshelves with the tomes on our required reading list for your quarter life crisis, and then try to buck up a little. It’s not so bad. … Read More

Books

Flavorpill’s Most Anticipated Books of 2012

By Emily Temple on

Since the world is going to end this year and everything, it’s never been a better time to follow the advice of P.J. O’Rourke, who recommends that you “always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” Not that anyone will be around to see you, we guess. Luckily, there are a ton of really exciting books coming out this year, including many that we’d be racing to read apocalypse or no, and good looks aside. Since publishing schedules are not often announced super-far in advance, and they’re subject to change based on a million factors, this is really a first half of 2012 list, heavy on spring releases, to be followed by a second-half of the year list in the summer. Click through to check out the books we’re most looking forward to in the first half of this year (boy was it hard to narrow it down to just ten!), and let us know which others you’re having trouble waiting for in the comments. … Read More

Books

Contemporary Literature's Greatest Geeks

By Judy Berman on

There’s no polite way to say it. The star of Roberto Bolaño’s long-awaited novel, The Third Reich, is a geek — a gamer geek, to be precise. And it’s the real-world implications of his all-consuming pastime that underlie the book’s action, even as he relaxes on the beach with his beautiful girlfriend and parties into the night with new friends. The immense role gaming plays in Bolaño’s atmospheric, slow-burning novel, written before The Savage Detectives and 2666 and serialized by The Paris Review in advance of its publication last month, got us thinking about the many memorable geeks contemporary literature has given us. A selection of our favorites is after the jump; add yours in the comments. … Read More

Books

Fake Books from Fiction That We Wish We Could Read

By Romy Oltuski on

Within literature’s greatest books lives another library of books, unpublished and unwritten, nested in other books, imagined by their authors and materialized only in the imaginations of their readers — a painfully vast body of potentially brilliant work that we’ll never get to hold in our hands. That’s not to say that every meta-book is a must-read; take for example The Dictionary of the Finnish Language by Caprinulge, which features in Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow – completely unreal and yet completely not something we’d choose to leaf through. Similarly, the white-supremacist The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard, thought up by Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby is not all that high on our wish list. But then there are titles that, wholly made up, sound like they might be even more captivating than the books they live in. And it’s those that we never stop hoping will one day be in print. After the jump, peruse 16 titles we’d add to our bookshelves, if only we could. … Read More

Books

15 Great Novels Set at Real-Life Colleges

By Emily Temple on

Now that it’s September, many of you are probably heading off to school — whether for the first time or the fourth — and even if you’re past school-age, the season does things to your heads, filling them with number 2 pencils and three hole punches and dreams of Philosophy textbooks. Or, at least, that’s all we can think about. College is an inspirational time, particularly for novelists: there is an entire genre based on the campus novel, including books about professors, students, and anyone else who spends a serious amount of time on the hallowed university grounds. In honor of the new school year, we’ve put together a list of great novels set at real-life colleges, whether explicitly stated or thinly veiled in their fictional forms. If you’re starting school this fall, you’d do well to check out what other people think of your new home and what you might expect from your next few years there, and if you’ve already finished, well, everyone likes to read about their alma mater, hopefully shouting out, ‘that’s not how it was!’ and ‘look, that’s me!’ in equal measure. Click through to see our list, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorite college novels in the comments. … Read More

Film

10 Great Movies for Book Lovers

By Jason Bailey on

Hey there, bookworms, it’s National Book Lovers Day! How’s about celebrating by, um, watching a movie? (Our logic is less than ironclad, we’ll admit.) Sure, the moving picture doesn’t always do right by the written word, but a few fine films have celebrated literature and writers in ways memorable, thought-provoking, and entertaining; we’ve assembled ten of our favorites after the jump, with plenty of room in the comments for you to throw in your own. … Read More