#tobyreads: On Book Groups & De Facto Extra Credit

I may have lost track of the number of book groups I’m in at this point. Four? Five? I run one, and am now in the semi-regular position of putting together the reading list for early 2014. (One prediction: the expanded edition of Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love will make an appearance.) It’s something I value a lot — getting to talk about books with smart people is never not time well spent, and in a lot of cases, I’ve […]

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Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs: The Movie

On the first episode of All Things Considered of the new year in 2001, there was a story on the many children of  Screamin’ Jay Hawkins coming together and meeting for the first time. When I say many, I don’t mean Catholic or Hasidic many, I mean 57. The man who crooned “I put a Spell on You” and “Constipation Blues” had 57 children living in various places, and they all came together for this reunion of sorts. I thought about that […]

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Vol. 1 Brooklyn Presents: The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart, Live

You can have a truly amazing novel about to come out that might change the course of American literature for the next half-century, but does it have a Gary Shteyngart blurb on the the cover? That’s really all that matters. The Shteyngart blurb has become almost a seal of approval that, while comical in the sheer amount of books he’s actually blurbed, are actually really good ways to tell if you’re going to like a book or not. Inspired by […]

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