Big ups to header-quote-provider Richard Powers, whose new novel The Echo Maker won The National Book Award for fiction last night.
I have a copy of The Echo Maker, bought at a Borders in Chicago with the Zombie Queen and King last month, still in my suitcase. I'm looking forward to sitting down with it soon. Ahead of it on the reading queue? The End, the last of the Lemony Snicket books, and Rory Stewart's The Places In Between, bought at the Powell's mothership in my new second-favorite city, Portland, OR. (Also bought at Powell's: the awesome David Chinitz's long-awaited T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, which does me the great honor of citing my paper on Eliot's interest in, and criticism of, mystery fiction.)