All Intensive Purposes

Jonathan Franzen, about what's he's reading this summer:

I’ve just finished reading the second issue of the new journal n+1 basically cover to cover—something I almost never do with any magazine. I especially enjoyed a novella-length, terrifically funny essay on Isaac Babel and modern Babel scholarship by a woman named Elif Batuman, and a smart, affecting riff on J.M. Coetzee by the smart, affecting young novelist Benjamin Kunkel. Just when you’re thinking you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls in your hands.

The New York Observer (link will expire someday soon).

And a reminder that there are some people in whose intellectual crowd Jonathan Franzen isn't hanging out. Frank Gehry, on what he's up to:

I’m also listening to The Iliad. I put all the books in my iPod. I have one iPod that has the complete works of Proust, and I take that with me—when I’m depressed, I listen to it. And I try not to read architecture books.