Bookslut points us to an article by novelist and political commentator James Dellingpole: “Whisper it: you don’t need to have read John Updike.” The main point about not feeling bad because you haven’t read every work, or even every writer, in the canon is a good one, but I really like his final thoughts:

All novels are flawed, that’s the whole point. Dickens goes on a bit as – my, and how! – does George Eliot; War and Peace ends with 100 pages of rambling, esoteric spiritual drivel; Proust badly needs pruning; Dan Brown and Jeffrey Archer aren’t great prose stylists.

As a novelist it’s the first – and most depressing – thing you learn about your trade: that between the sweeping ambition of your conception and the reality of your execution there will always be a terrifyingly large gulf. All novels, even the greatest ones, are failures. It’s just that most readers are too polite to notice.

An Anglican priest from Canada is retracing Kerouac and Cassady’s trip from the second part of On the Road, and he’s blogging it.

In 2007, reporters from the Boston Globe and USA Today also followed Kerouac’s fumes.

{Image from On the Road 2009 blog}

In her introduction to Oliver Twist (Barnes & Noble edition, 2003), Jill Muller talks about Charles Dickens’ wild public performances and the toll they took:

During the last decade of his life, Dickens toured England, Ireland, and America, giving public readings of favorite sections from his novels. “Sikes and Nancy,” based on chapter XLVII of Oliver Twist, was a particular favorite of both author and audience. While Dickens’s rendition of Nancy’s brutal murder sent audiences into fits of screaming and fainting, a physician waited back stage to monitor the ailing author’s pulse rate. Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster speculated that the energy and fervor with which Dickens threw himself into these performances may have contributed to his early death from heart disease in 1870.

In the endnote for that chapter, Muller writes:

Dickens’s dramatic rendering of this scene became the most celebrated of his public readings, and one in which the author clearly took a ghoulish glee. His son and some of his friends believed that the emotional intensity of Dickens’s frequent performances of “Sikes and Nancy” contributed to his early death.

Google Book Search has just announced that it’s made 1.5 million public-domain books easily readable on mobile devices, such as the iPhone. The book were already scanned and available at Google Books but could be hard to view on tiny screens. As always, access is free.

The main page for the mobile books is here.

The announcement is on Inside Google Book Search here.

If there’s a public-domain book that you’d like to read online and/or have as a PDF, and a physical copy is in the Boston Public Library, just request a scan via OpenLibrary.org and it’ll happen within days for free. We live in amazing times, people.

{via PublicDomainReprints.org Blog}