Fall Book Listapalooza

I know you're all fretting over what to read over the cold winter months as you stoke the hearth logs and sip your cocoa. Because both my time and my PJs are short, I've winkled out several worthy Fall booklists from the secretive hand of the vast internet and here's what I've scored for you, my sweeties:

From New York Magazine, its Fall Preview 2005. Zadie's here. E.L., too. New Lemony Snicket coming forth soon - didn't know that. Best title on the list: Memories of My Melancholy Whores - first fiction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a decade.

Seattle Times offers its Fall Books 2005, organized by the month published. Zadie, E.L., and the Whores - all present and accounted for.

In true American autumnal spirit, the San Francisco Chronicle works major football games and film openings into its "Books lead a fall trifecta" article.

MSNBC focuses on non-fiction in "Books about the famous and fascinating."

OK, enough lists. But here are a few interesting author/book articles:

The Independent has a terrific interview with Fay Weldon here.

Evidently the Beatles only get bigger with the passage of time, although the writer of this review of three Beatle-oriented books in The Sunday Times laments that there are only a couple of people left out there who might have new nuggets of information to share (most notably Jane Asher and Neil Aspinall). Their lips - so far - are sealed.

I'm settling into Robert Graves' Goodbye To All That. Yes, I know I should have read this account of Graves' time in the trenches years ago, especially since I'm such an aficianado of the First World War. But I'm glad I've left it till now - it's more meaningful to my research for the book I'm writing. Yes, the author is the same Robert Graves who wrote I, Claudius.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, died Sunday. I didn't realize he was credited with founding the whole self-help book genre (weren't there self-help books before?). Anyway, I had a hard time with Road, though everyone else thought it was a big, bad bag o' chips and all that. I think my cynical self gets in the way of self-help books - I try to work all that out with fiction. Which probably explains a whole lot. However, hats off the Dr. Peck for straightening out so many other people.