Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.
I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder.
Mary Roach's curiosity is notoriously infectious.
The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.'
Many people, I've noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards.
Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.
Television was not cool among the young people of my era, the last years of the '90s and the early '00s. It was not just old people who'd castigate you for watching anything but public television. We young people scoffed at each other about it.
I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.
Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals.
Trump has been fiercely mocked in the media since the 1980s. But Trump learned from someone to let all the mockery roll off his back, that the negative publicity was still publicity.
Book awards - in America, at least - are not like the Oscars. Awards are not cumulative, and in the case of something like the Pulitzers, the jurors often have another goal in mind: sales. They know that the Pulitzer stamp can sell a book.
A certain kind of person in America loves to note that they're currently soldiering through the latest Pulitzer winner for history, in particular. It connotes a certain gravitas, a connectedness to the literary and intellectual scene that most upwardly mobile professionals in America still desire.
We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media.
There are, of course, fat characters in books out there, some of them quite enduring and famous. But they tend to be creatures of young-adult or commercial fiction.
It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.
Indeed, there has never been any sort of organised movement of people who take their cats into the outdoors. Of course, the navy often took them on ships, but there they performed a function, mousing for the officers.
Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.
A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives.
Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.
Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness.
