David Foster Wallace, the late writer of Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and a University of Arizona alum, influenced a generation of writers with his hilarious, intelligent, dripping-with-irony-and-footnotes writing style.

But, as has been documented at length, Wallace fought depression and anxiety for 20 years, eventually succumbing in 2008 when he hanged himself in his California home.

Today, The New Yorker published an excerpt from a new David Foster Wallace Biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, written by New Yorker staff writer D.T. Max, which drops in as Wallace begins treatment at Granada House, a rehabilitation and treatment center in Massachusetts, not long following his first suicide attempt and in the midst of alcohol addiction.

If Wallace found himself in unfamiliar territory, the residents didn’t know what to make of him either. One remembers wondering, “This guy can probably go to Betty Ford. Why’s he here with us welfare babies?” No one really cared for his cleverness. He was to them a type they’d seen before, someone who, like the character Geoffrey Day in “Infinite Jest,” tries to “erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing-off.” Wallace was back in high school, trying to figure out his place in the pack. “It’s a rough crowd,” he wrote Rich C., “and sometimes I’m scared or feel superior or both.” Yet a piece of him was beginning to adjust to the new situation. He remembered his last failed attempt to get sober and how he was no longer writing and asked himself what he had to lose. He came to understand that the key this time was modesty. “My best thinking got me here” was a recovery adage that hit home, or, as he translated it in “Infinite Jest,” “logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.” He knew it was imperative to abandon the sense of himself as the smartest person in the room, a person too smart to be like one of the people in the room, because he was one of the people in the room. “I try hard to listen and do what [they say],” he wrote Rich C., “I’m trying to do it easy … this time,” not “get an A+…. I just don’t have enough gas right now to do anything fast or well. I’m trying to accept this.”

To read the rest of the excerpt, see David Foster Wallace in Recovery: An Excerpt From the New Biography at NewYorker.com.

Rottentomatoes.com is a great site to find out what film critics and other moviegoers think about movies. But if you want to know what the critics think about books, you had to check out several websites—until now.

The new website www.idreambooks.com gathers reviews in one place. It is "the first site on the Internet that aggregates reviews from professional book critics like New York Times or Washington Post and recommends a book if 70 percent of critics give it a positive rating—similar to rottentomatoes.com or metacritic.com."

Percentages are accompanied by either smiling or frowning clouds. But what the public likes may be different from what the critics say. The popular Fifty Shades of Grey only got a 30 percent rating.

The site also offers free book giveaways, with winners are posted on the site's blog.

While most of the non-teenage girl universe has acknowledged that the Twilight books are not particularly well-written, some literary experts from Arizona's middle-of-the-state institute of higherish learning, Girls Gone Wild University and Casino, are taking a bold stance in a new book, that Stephenie Meyer's series of books are...good?

So what has drawn so many fans, particularly teenage girls, to the “Twilight” series?

First, according to Blasingame, Meyer’s skill at “conjuring caring and intertwining between her protagonist, Bella, and young women readers is undeniable.” She also has been successful because she writes with detailed description, Blasingame said.

“She avoids passive voice and opens sentences with what she wants the reader to see and know first, getting right to the action of the sentence.”

Blasingame added, “In every sentence, Meyer leads with the picture that she wants in the reader’s mind and then moves on to the sentence’s action, described by verbs that are spot-on accurate for conveying exactly what she wants the reader to experience through Bella.”

Blasingame used a computer program to analyze the language usage Meyer’s writing, choosing three random but consecutive pages from the first and last books in the series.

He found that Meyer’s writing style/voice “is remarkably consistent, almost mechanically so. One of the most difficult things for authors of novels, especially new writers of long novels, is to sustain voice and style. This author’s statistics, however, change not a whit from the first book to the last.”

He also found that Meyer’s writing style is “simple and uncomplicated but also clear, coherent, and never ambiguous,” the readability is high, and that she consistently uses participial phrases to end sentences.

“Stephenie is a master at giving you a reward for going to the next page,” Blasingame said. “She builds suspense well with very selective prose. She has quite an imagination. It touches something in the unconscious mind.”

Another possibility: teenage girls like vampires and enjoy stories in which boring, uninteresting young women are swept up in an exciting world not of their own creation, regardless of how well those stories are actually told. That's just my theory, though.

[HT: Phoenix New Times]

I have to admit, I've probably demonized Justice Antonin Scalia, partially because he seems like an insufferable jerk, but I don't know, I tend to think I could get along with anyone who's a David Foster Wallace fan. I feel so conflicted.

Among the legacies of David Foster Wallace, the pioneering postmodernist who produced influential essays, short stories and the novel “Infinite Jest” before his 2008 suicide, count this: Antonin Scalia, author. Or, at least, co-author of “Reading Law,” which the justice discusses today with The Wall Street Journal.

“He was a very personable fellow,” Justice Scalia says of Mr. Wallace in an interview. “As co-Snoots, we got along very well,” he adds, using a term Mr. Wallace popularized for those whose taste in diction runs to the persnickety. According to a 2001 Wallace essay, it could stand for “Syntax Nudniks of Our Time.”

Justice Scalia made a point of meeting Mr. Wallace during a 2007 visit to Claremont, Calif., where the shaggy-haired writer, sometimes seen in a do-rag, taught at Pomona College. The two had lunch, says Bryan A. Garner, a lexicographer and legal-writing consultant from Texas who arranged the encounter.

Mr. Wallace found it eye-opening, he says.

“He said, ‘Politically, we’re not alike at all, but that was really a fascinating lunch,’” says Mr. Garner, co-author of “Reading Law” and one earlier book with Justice Scalia.

Looking to go green—with your food, that is?

Tucsonan Jay Wesley Anderson has written Street Smart Vegan: A Simple Guide to Going Vegan. (148 pages, $9.99 ebook, $12.95 paperback, available at Lovin' Spoonfuls Vegan Restaurant, Amazon and iBookstore)

The book covers vegan dos and don'ts; easy vegan recipes; consuming cruelty-free, cholesterol-free foods; how to lose weight with plant-based whole foods; and minimizing your eco-footprint.

Anderson advises that a person doesn't have to make a vegan transition over night and that it should be guilt-free and fun. His own transition took a few years. He also advises vegans to take a vitamin B-12 supplement.

Anderson says it's good to have a few standby vegan recipes when you are on the go. One example: a sandwich with hummus, spinach, avocado, cucumber, sunflower sprouts and tomato. Sounds tasty.

Author bio (by author):

Vegan author Jay Wesley Anderson helps new vegans go vegan and vegetarians become totally vegan. He writes to eliminate the guesswork, uncertainty, and misinformation about the vegan lifestyle. He holds a degree in Environmental Policy with a minor in Anthropology and began his gradual vegan lifestyle detour in 2005.

People, people. I'm not entirely sure what "brown sauce" is, but if your girlfriend is reading Fifty Shades of Grey, I'm pretty sure you shouldn't be squirting it at her.

"He said he had every intention of squirting sauce over Miss McCormick, but he now regrets having done this, realising how stupid it sounds.

"He didn't realise that the sauce incident would be classed as an assault. He is sorry for his actions."

"He lost his temper and went round to her home armed with a bottle of brown sauce, which he should never have done.

"Emma says it stung her eyes and it was all over the walls, which she had to clean up afterwards. I've spoken to Raymond and he's extremely sorry about it.

"He was angry that she suggested he slapped her because he hadn't. But they are now friends and they have been in touch with each other."

From the July/August issue of the Atlantic, a new short story by Elmore Leonard is online for your reading enjoyment:

The day Victor turned twenty he rode three bulls, big ones, a good 1,800 pounds each—Cyclone, Spanish Fly, and Bulldozer—rode all their bucks and twists, Victor’s free hand waving the air until the buzzer honked at eight seconds for each ride, not one of the bulls able to throw him. He rolled off their rumps, stumbled, keeping his feet, and walked to the gate not bothering to look at the bulls, see if they still wanted to kill him. He won Top Bull Rider, 4,000 dollars and a new saddle at the All-Indian National Rodeo in Palm Springs. It came to … Jesus, like 200 dollars a second. That afternoon Victorio Colorado, the name he went by in the program, was the man.

He left the rodeo grounds as Victor to celebrate with two Mojave boys, Nachee and Billy Cosa, brought along from Arizona when the boss, Kyle McCoy, moved his business to Indio, near Palm Springs. The Mojave boys handled Kyle’s fighting bulls, bringing them from the pens to the chute where Victor, a Mimbreño Apache, would slip aboard from the fence, wrap his hand in the bull rope tight as he could get it, and believe he was ready to ride. He’d take a breath, say “Let me out of here,” and the gate would swing open and a ton of pissed-off bull would come flying out.

Well, I guess we should have seen this coming: boutique hotels are offering Fifty Shades of Grey packages, although I would imagine you'd need to bring your own controlling multi-millionaire carrying along a sex contract.

The saddest part of this video for me is when there's a brief glimpse of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King next to a giant stack of Fifty Shades.... Wallace's unfinished posthumous novel about the IRS and boredom doesn't stand a chance against tales of anal beads and blindfolds, really.

Brazilian inmates can now have their prison sentences shortened by reading books from an approved list and writing essays about them.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

That’s right, Brazil’s government recently rolled out a new program, Redemption through Reading, that allows inmates to shave four days off their sentence for every book they read, with a maximum of 48 days off their sentence per year, Reuters reported Monday. The program will be extended to certain prisoners in four federal prisons in Brazil holding some of the country’s most notorious criminals.

According to Reuters, a special panel will determine which inmates are eligible to participate. Those chosen can choose from works of literature, philosophy, science, or the classics, reading up to 12 books a year. Flashback from grade school: they’ll have four weeks to read each book and write an essay that must “make correct use of paragraphs, be free of corrections, use margins, and legible joined-up writing,” according to a notice published Monday in Brazil’s official gazette.

“A person can leave prison more enlightened and with an enlarged vision of the world,” Sao Paulo lawyer Andre Kehdi, who directs a book donation project for prisons, told Reuters.

In theory, this all sounds wonderful. The Redemption through Reading program seems like a great way to tackle to problem of overcrowded prisons while educating convicts. However, I'm a little skeptical of how this will pan out in practice. As a college student, I can tell you that being able to write an essay about a book doesn't always mean that you have to read the entire thing. I don't really know how these prisons will go about checking that inmates have read and understood the material, but it's an interesting idea and I'm curious to see what comes of it.

If you're interested in helping prisoners better themselves through reading closer to home, consider volunteering with local charity Read Between the Bars, which sends packages of books to those incarcerated around the state. More information about that group can be found at their Facebook page.

Local author Jeff Sambur recently won a gold medal in the travel essays category at the Independent Publishing Awards for his book Destroying Demons on the Diagonal. ($13.95, 334 pages) It is about "a firefighter's San Diego to Maine bicycle ride into retirement."

Some interesting facts about his ride: He biked 6,518 miles; passed through 17 states; spent 17 weeks and 5 days on the road; had two weeks of non-cycling days. He writes, "We live in a beautiful country ... go out there and see it before you are so old, that walking the pug dog is the highlight of the day."

A book summary and bio are below the cut: