MATTHEW SPECKTOR
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

The devil on my left shoulder whispers this: “Bird Cloud” is an especially off-putting book about a wealthy and imperious writer who annoys the local residents (she runs off their cows), overwrites about nature and believes people will sympathize with her about the bummers involved in getting her Japanese soaking tub, tatami-mat exercise area, Mexican talavera sink and Brazilian floor tiles installed just so. “Bird Cloud” is shelter porn with a side of highbrow salsa. When Ms. Proulx’s house turns out to be a bit of a folly, its roads impassable in winter, you feel that a bell somewhere has been struck, and justice served.

Peeling Away Theories on Gender and the Brain

Adam Phillips reviews Gary Greenberg's MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION

http://bit.ly/5DaLOA *Wow, a 2009 fiction list full of stuff I've never heard of that I'd actually like to read.

The SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK review by @ebertchicago is one of the best things I've ever read. Wise, poetic, touching: http://bit.ly/cWuQD

VanderMeer's Booklife: excellent guide to living the writerly life in the 21st Cen http://tinyurl.com/ygkpv7k

Freakonomics Sequel Gets Climate Change Wrong - http://bit.ly/xY7e1 getting things this wrong is not v. helpful, particularly now

How SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Engineering Wrong: The new book Superfreakonomics... http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/24274/

The Snake Detection Theory posits a fascinating relationship between serpents and primates

By the time J. G. Ballard died in April of this year, talk of his long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard inspired), yet the news still came as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, at ease in the cold ruins of the millennium a lifetime sooner than the rest of us; his passing registered as a disorienting claim of time upon the timeless. Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Now, and not a moment too soon, comes The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Norton, $35), a staggering 1,200-page collection of a lifetime’s labors in the medium in which Ballard was perhaps most at home.

DFW on Updike