for You Don’t Love Me Yet. From Lethem’s website:

Wed 3/21 New York, Barnes & Noble Union Square

Thurs 3/22 Philadelphia, Free Library

Mon 3/26 Raleigh, North Carolina, Quail Ridge Books

Tues 3/27 Boston, Brookline Booksmith/Coolidge Theater

Wed 3/28 Princeton New Jersey, Princeton University

Thurs 3/29 Washington D.C., Politics and Prose

Fri 3/30 New York, Housing Works

Mon 4/2 Minneapolis, University Book Center

Tues 4/3 Milwaukee, Harry W. Schwartz Bookseller

Wed 4/4 Iowa City, Prairie Lights

Thurs 4/5 Ann Arbor, Michigan, Shaman Drum

Mon 4/9 Los Angeles, LA Public Library, Central Library

Tues 4/10 Pasadena, Vroman’s

Wed 4/11 Los Angeles, Skylight Books

Thurs 4/12 Portland, Oregon, City Arts & Lectures

Sat 4/14 Berkeley, Moe’s Books

Sun 4/15 Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz

Mon 4/16 San Francisco, Booksmith

Tues 4/17 Menlo Park, Kepler’s

Wed 4/18 Seattle, Seattle Arts and Lectures

Sun 4/22 Denver, Denver Public Library

Mon 4/23 Boulder, Colorado, Boulder Bookstore

Tues 4/24 Denver, Tattered Cover

Wed 4/25 New York, 92nd Street Y

Thurs 4/26 Brooklyn, P.S. 107

From “Bedside Reading,” a friendly little collection (with Amazon links!) of some New Yorker contributors’ literary discoveries, and one reject. The other book-recommenders are Sasha Frere-Jones, Malcolm Gladwell, Jill Lepore, Mary Ellen Mark, Paul Muldoon (glad the poet isn’t last), Nick Paumgarten, and David Sipress.

Despite the hoopla surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” I was unprepared for two aspects of it that no one had mentioned to me: how funny it was, and how feminist. (The ending, in which the widowed mother, shed of her marriage, is now ready to make a better life for herself at the age of seventy-five, is like a stiletto of ice slipping neatly into, and then between, the ribs.) On my bedside table now is Franzen’s “The Discomfort Zone,” a wondrous book of lively, intelligent, intimate—and funny—narrative essays, which has received in the Times two of the most bewildering reviews I’ve ever read. Franzen is never the hero of his own anecdotes, and he observes the world (and himself) the way the baby of a family often does: with a kind of ruthless, custodial affection. He is able to see how three different centuries have converged upon Americans and how disorienting that can be. Even the cover charms: on the jacket is a Victorian “Map of a Man’s Heart,” reprinted from McCall’s and looking like some jokey geography thought up by Lewis Carroll, with its “Broad Range of Interests,” its “Province of Deep Thought,” its “Memory of Mother Moat” and “Ravine of the Limited Take-Home.” There are few ways in, though the “Tunnel of Fetch and Carry” will get one across the memory of mom. It all makes me think that people do not have the wit and humor that they used to.

I like you more all the time, Lorrie Moore.

The always wonderful Patricia Storms, who previously gave us the gift of “The Amazing Adventures of Lethem and Chabon,” has created another Jonathans-related drama in cartoon form, set this time in a topsy-turvy world where writers of chick lit, that is to say “chick lit,” on an innocent retreat are attacked in a dastardly fashion by a dominatrix impresario with something up her sleeve.
Also: Meryl Streep grew up reading The New Yorker, so what does she think of The Devil Wears Prada, the book and the movie? The Guardian‘s clever Emma Brockes finds out. Streep swears a lot, which is charming.

Jonathan Lethem will be reading in New York on September 17 at the freshly brewed cultural entity the Starbucks Salon, a term I fear we will all be hearing quite a lot in the years to come. Still, I like the look of some of these events, especially this one, I admit. The site is a mite overproduced, so you might have some trouble finding the listing (which you can have emailed to you as a reminder; thanks, Starbucks!…oh dear). It’s at 76 Greene St. at 4 p.m.

Click to enlarge; go to the site to interact muddledly with some Flash and illustrations on graph paper and mandatory youthful music. Keep your index finger on mute just in case.

By the way, I can’t believe I only just discovered Lethem’s interview with Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone. Now this is going to be fun, whatever Louis Menand says.

Does Michiko Kakutani have trouble with despair? Specifically, understanding what it might be like to be caught in it? Her self-congratulatory review of Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone would seem to suggest that this is so, which would be an unfortunate deficiency in a critic of literature. She also seems not to have been following the progress of the essay over the past twenty-odd years. She writes:

There are two extended riffs in this volume where Mr. Franzen momentarily puts aside his fascination with himself to give the reader some wonderfully observed musings on two subjects that have long preoccupied him: Peanuts cartoons and bird-watching.

I’d like to see her attempt “musings” as “wonderfully observed” as those in “My Bird Problem” and “The Comfort Zone” (both of which first appeared in The New Yorker). She continues, pointlessly, “Indeed the young Mr. Franzen comes across as less of a Snoopy — ‘the warm puppy who amused the others with the cute things he said and then excused himself from the table and wrote cute sentences in his notebook’ — than as a kind of mean-spirited Lucy on steroids.” Must authors be Snoopys? I’d rather read Lucy’s memoir, msyelf. Let’s not forget that her review of Nick Hornby’s comically unsettling novel A Long Way Down lacked both depth and empathy in the extreme. She writes of Franzen’s book, “Just why anyone would be interested in pages and pages about this unhappy relationship or the self-important and self-promoting contents of Mr. Franzen’s mind remains something of a mystery.” It is simply impossible to view any art, in particular contemporary nonfiction, without the ability to answer that question.