Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Finished this last week
I’m not usually a big historical novel person
This is about Brooklyn, New York, not Manhattan Beach, California and not Manhattan, NYC
This was more interesting to me b/c I live in New York City now
There’s a diver and a gangster and a father who somehow makes it through
The writing was better than the story
The diving parts were the best, understanding the difference types of knots, understanding the different types of great,
Office Politics by Wilfred Sheed
This is about a failing magazine. The book isn't new, it’s set in the 60s. It’s about the internal power struggles to run a critically acclaimed, but slowly dying magazine. It’s supposed to be noble and about higher things, but its takes are so milquetoast it doesn’t matter, no matter how idealistic the editors are
It’s a humorous setup, about how much the editors care about a magazine that not many people care about
There are moments where it’s good, but to make it so, they have to navigate through their own internal friction and blistering side-eyes
I’m about halfway through, I won’t give the catalyzing event but we’ll see how the crew in the book reacts
The POV alternates, I’m enjoying it
This is a McNally Jackson release, which is a bookstore in Brooklyn and across the city that has become its own small empire.
One of their locations is in Williamsburg where I’ve been parking our car a lot recently, so it’s becoming a habit to drop in as I did this afternoon.
Last week, I stopped in with my kids and they an okay kids section which is nice, and on the way out I noticed they sold the literary magazines from UNC-Wilmington (yes, I got my master’s there) and the Sewanee Review (yes that place is in an isolated village off I-24 but is only like an 1.5 hour from Nashville and became a favorite stopover of my family’s in recent years. To see both of them in a Brooklyn store shows you how wide, but insular the MFA literary culture can be.
This week I’m traveling a bit for a wedding, so hopefully I’ll get to read some on the plane.
Keep going-
Josh Spilker