Read It, April 2015

The final tally for books completed in April, 2015 is kind of disappointing:

• Andy Weir's The Martian
• Lawrence Wright's Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
• J. G. Ballard's Kingdom Come
• Harry Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero: Planet of the Robot Slaves

Only four books, and Bill was quite short. I am also about halfway through Richard Hughes' The Fox in the Attic, and I should be able to finish it in a few days. I really hope, in general, to be able to finish more than a book a week, on average. But I guess I should be grateful that I can get any reading time in at all these days.

I have a lot of books to choose from in May. I have picked up the first two books of Karl Ove Knausgaard's massive novel, My Struggle, translated by Don Bartlett. I thumbed through these in Nicola's Books down in Ann Arbor and had to bring them home, although with a few others. There is more non-fiction reading too, including The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. I think that one is probably up next, with its particular relevance to the situation in Baltimore specifically, but in pretty much every American community in general.

I have far more plans and ambitions for podcasts than I do quiet time to record, but I am considering moving forward with a podcast to be called the Saginaw Review of Books, modeled very roughly after the New York Review of Books (and similar publications from London and Los Angeles). I have long had the desire to start publishing a print magazine, even small and without contributors, or with very few contributors. I had even considered mimeographing it for old-school vibe, but the larger point was that I didn't want to make it an online magazine. Could a podcast work? With contributors, either coming in to the home studio, or contributing over Skype? What do you think?