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‘Tis the season for out-of-office replies. Here are the 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:
“Writer’s block just means you got up from your desk.” Elmore Leonard is one of my all-time favorite writers and my ideal summer beach read, so I saved critic Anthony Lane’s excellent profile of Dutch in The New Yorker to read in print. (My highest readerly compliment.) I didn’t realize The Library of America offers a box set of Leonard’s novels! If I was going to recommend one volume to start with, it’d be Four Later Novels, as the first three — Get Shorty, Rum Punch, and Out of Sight — were all made into good movies (Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Rum Punch, is my favorite Tarantino movie), and the last in the batch, Tishomingo Blues, was Leonard’s personal favorite. (My other favorite adaptation is the TV series Justified, which was based on Leonard’s story “Fire in the Hole.”) Here’s a drawing I did twenty years ago (!) of Dutch’s 10 pieces of writing advice, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle”:
This summer’s big book is finished! War and Peace was awesome and weird and I loved it. A few folks asked me what translation I read. I started with Pevear and Volokhonsky, assuming a contemporary translation would be better than an old one, but boy, was I wrong! I found things way, way easier-going when I switched to the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation. (I plan on reading Anna Karenina this winter — I’ll either go with the Maudes or Constance Garnett, or try out Rosamund Bartlett’s translation.)
“On the one hand, reading old books is a luxurious escape from your contemporary moment. On the other hand, it expands you in ways that make you more equipped to deal with your contemporary moment.” On breaking bread with the dead.
I approve this summer travel message: “Less phone, more sketchbook.” (Some inspiration: the family travel diaries of architect Carlo Aymonino — here’s an English translation.)
Reminder: Airplane mode can be a way of life.