Read This: Character Approved for Summer

Earlier this week, I started writing for the USA cable network’s Character Approved blog, which “celebrates the people, places and things that are making a mark by positively influencing our cultural landscape,” basically serving as a literary correspondent—a role I inherited from Ann Kingman, one of the founders of the excellent Books on the Nightstand site. Every week, I’ll be focusing on a book, or an author, or a publisher, maybe even a super-zealous librarian; if I think it’s changing the world of literature for the better, I’m going to do what I can to share it with readers, just as I’ve been doing here, only reaching out to a different audience.

I started out with a list of summer reading recommendations, which ranges from Those Guys Have All the Fun, a marvelously thick oral history of ESPN as far back as the pre-launch fundraising and as recent LeBron’s “Decision,” to 12 Who Don’t Agree, in which Russian journalist Valery Panyushkin talks to participants in a 2007 protest against Vladimir Putin’s government to create a group portrait of what a progressive movement really looks like at street level. Plus three other amazing books I think folks are going to love… some of which I’ll almost certainly be talking about here, too, in some context. We shall see!

30 June 2011 | read this |