Ed swipes at Jay McInerney, unfairly, I think. McInerney’s review (of Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days) was so entertaining that it made me curious about what else McInerney is writing these days. For my money, though, the best review of the book appeared in the LA Times; although it was a little more sedate, it provided historical context, illuminating a seeming contradiction in the balance of fiction and fact that Dubus lays claim to.
Max answers the question: why is there no literary imdb? It could be easy, since there are obviously APIs for books’ ISBNs — that’s how LibraryThing and Goodreads must get their data. But the original question isn’t for a massive database of books so much as it is for a massive database of book reviews. I think Librarything and Goodreads both are good for this — they combine social networking and book databases and reviews — but it might help if the major book review sections joined and added their voices so you could follow them.
Speaking of joining and following, publisher W.W. Norton is on Twitter. I didn’t realize that I’d been getting addicted to the micro-blogging service (can I call it that?) until it went haywire last week and I got a twitterjones. Anyway, as Ron says, it would be nice for publishers to use web 2.0 services like Twitter for behind-the-scenes info rather than just another press release venue. But maybe that’s just us, Ron — maybe we’re too inside baseball, and the average reader can’t be expected to care too much about what Andre Dubus had for breakfast.
