“This is perhaps the most arrogant belief a human skull can contain without exploding. After all, God has far better things to do than creating self-important little species such as ours. He’s got wars, deaths, disasters and diseases to ignore for starters.”

Just spend the rest of the night reading Charlie Brooker’s columns. Probably the only person I’d submit to reading regularly with no screening.

“People like Passaro, of course, tend to think that anyone indifferent to the latest "smart” authors must be vegetating in front of the television, or at best silently mouthing through a Tom Clancy thriller. The truth is that a lot of us are perfectly happy with literature written before we were born—and why shouldn’t we be? The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in Balzac’s Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures when his daughter says ‘Toyota Celica’ in her sleep. This is not to say that traditional realism is the only valid approach to fiction. But today’s Serious Writers fail even on their own postmodern terms. They urge us to move beyond our old-fashioned preoccupation with content and plot, to focus on form instead—and then they subject us to the least-expressive form, the least-expressive sentences, in the history of the American novel.“

Absolutely.

It’s nice to see something I wrote showing up on the web (even though I nabbed it from Gizmodo). I stand by my assessment!

I wouldn’t have guessed Ebert for a sentimental book collector like myself. Nice little read.