My brother just emailed to say he had been quoted on Bookslut, and challenging me to identify his quote. The possibilities are :

Karin Kross, in her interview with Craig Thompson, writes “A co-worker of mine who doesn’t read comics noticed my copy of Blankets and said, ‘Oh, I’ve heard that’s great.’ ” My brother used to read a lot of comics but I think he doesn’t so much these days.

Liz Miller, reviewing P by Andrew Lewis Conn, writes of “this guy I knew in college — well-read, outspoken and crazy good at writing. The kind of guy who had the potential to be a Great Writer of Our Time, but for two fatal flaws: he couldn’t stop ripping off his favorite writers, and he was one pretentious motherfucker, with no substance to his style.” Obviously not my brother, because Liz Miller went to college in L.A. and my brother studied in Dublin and Oxford. 😉

Further on, however, one of Liz Miller’s commentators on Cold Mountain has a boyfriend who “pointed out one problem with both the book and movie: Ada, Inman, and Ruby are all perfect people, never doing anything wrong. Meanwhile, all around them is a highly flawed world of evil”. Liz Miller’s friend’s name is not given.

An anonymous Amazon reviewer of a book by a Democratic presidential candidate is quoted as saying “This sad, sorry literary effort merely reaffirms that Mr. Sharpton is little more than a posturing, flamboyant, hate-driven windbag whose chief purpose seems to be promoting divisiveness.”

And finally, a reader of the weblog section found Margaret Truman’s Murder at the Library of Congress “a bit unsatisfying as a mystery, but refreshingly pro-sex for the over-sixties.”

I can’t see my brother caring much about sex for the over-sixties or the Rev. Al Sharpton, and Karin Kross lives and works in Austin, Texas while my brother lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts, so I reckon his girlfriend has been reading Cold Mountain.

I have to go to the airport in ten minutes. I hope he emails me before that.