In the past year I’ve announced that I’m leaving journalism. It’s taken longer than I expected. There was always one more thing to cover, one more score to settle, something I love that I wanted to express.
There’s also the 50 advanced review copies of books I have. These “galleys” as they’re called are piled high in my office. I love books, and publishers like me because I review their books (well, maybe except for Harper’s, but I’ll get to that), and I feel like if they were nice enough to send me advanced galleys of some cool-looking books, the least I can do is review them.
I’m not going to be weeding out the books to find ones that I find most interesting. I’m just going to take the 50 books in my pile and review them. I’ll name a few of the titles. The Blue Flame by George Pelecanos; Nolan: The Singular Life of An American Original by Tim Brown; Red Sheet by James Elroy; Honey by Imani Thompson; The Breakup by Kurt Anderson; Bones of Jade, Flesh Like Ice by Gracie Marsden; Every Inch a Lady by Audrey Smaltz; When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke, the Country—and Led Us To Today by Jonathan Kaufman; I Am the Night: The Ultimate Unauthorized History of Batman: The Animated Series by Daniel Dockery; Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe by Gail Crowther; The Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead; Exit 8 by Genki Kawamura; Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art by Daisy Dixon; Pope Leo XIV: The Biography by Elise Ann Allen; American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington by H.W. Brands; The Disappears by Marlon James; Punk in Fifty Pieces: Punk Rock, Post-Punk, New Wave, and the Five Years That Changed Pop Music Forever by Kevin Dettmar; and A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson.
I also have galleys of books that are being reissued in new editions: Ordinary People by Judith Guest and To Jerusalem and Back by Saul Bellow.
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