My brother recently got married, and I've been away from my computer for about a week. (Congratulations, guys!)
I'm starting to catch up on some of the recent "bloggable" reviews. Here are some things to read:
1. Michiko Kakutani's positive review of Khaled Hosseini's new novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns.
2. After reading Pankaj Mishra's long review of Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man, I'm contemplating teaching a class (this coming fall?) on 9/11 Fiction. A number of the potential authors for such a course are talked about in Mishra's review -- Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist might be included, as might Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (published on 9/11, it's technically a 'pre 9/11' text, but its subject matter goes nicely with the topic).
3. I'm not sympathetic to the overall conservative/hawkish point of view expressed in this recent piece in the New York Times, but I'm very unhappy about the recent arrest of the Iranian-American intellectual Haleh Esfandiari in Iran.