Book News Roundup: Nothing rhymes with Orange

  • Last week, The Seattle Public Library announced that next year's Seattle Reads selection will be Tommy Orange's acclaimed debut novel There, There. Orange will be in town on May 16th and 17th for several events around town.
  • I haven't read There, There — it's one of those books that all of a sudden everyone had read and loved, so I didn't feel like my time as a reviewer would be best-used by giving it even more attention. But now that it's going to be a part of the civic conversation in Seattle next spring, I'm excited to finally dig into my copy so I can talk about it with the rest of you.
  • One writer I'm not excited about is Richard Ford, the novelist who once spat on Colson Whitehead at a party over a negative review and has a very troubling history with regards to reviews and race. Ford is being honored by The Paris Review next year in a ceremony that will feature Bruce Springsteen. I swear I aged twenty years writing that last sentence. This is another disheartening sign that the elder generation of arts gatekeepers won't hand over the reins to young artists until they simply can't hold the reins anymore.
  • These assholes who are upset that the new Watchmen TV series is about politics are the same assholes who completely misunderstand the Watchmen comic series, which was nothing so much as a refutation of everything that Thatcherite England stood for. Rorschach is not a hero, he's the exposed Ayn Rand undercurrent of superheroes. If you're upset about race being inserted into Watchmen, you are — and I do not say this lightly — a racist.
  • The Washington Post announced that they would be publishing The Mueller Report Illustrated in December of this year.