Hiding from the News

Sorry to be MIA for the last two weeks, but I was on vacation. As a result, I'm not completely sure what's still news and what isn't, a somewhat debilitating condition for a blogger. I thought, for example, that I might link to this report throwing cold water on the charges, trumpeted so loudly a few weeks ago, that the British MP George Galloway was secretly working for the Iraqi government. But the article's a few days old, and I suppose they've been chewing it all over the blogosphere since then. It's even possible that the same people who went after the BBC for messing up a few details of the Jessica Lynch story are now going after the Christian Science Monitor for getting this one wrong. Beats me: Like I said, I've been away.

Fact is, I avoided all newscasts while I was gone, did a pretty good job of avoiding newspapers, and took only a couple of spins around the Web. I get the impression that events of enormous importance have taken place in the Middle East, but I'm not entirely sure what they are. I heard about a sex scandal in Britain and about Orrin Hatch saying something stupid in America, neither of which are novel enough to qualify as "news"; and I read that Gregory Peck died. I wasn't even a fan of Gregory Peck, yet news of his demise reached me while news from Iraq did not. With due respect to Mr. Peck, that's what I call a good vacation.

Just before my trip, the lefty site CounterPunch asked a bunch of people, including me, to recommend their favorite novels written in English since 1900. The results were published this past weekend; and since I don't have any more transient prose to recommend, you can treat the books I list there as my reading suggestions for today. Add 'em all up, and you get well over 4,000 pages to devour. Tomorrow I promise to point to something shorter.