Saturday, August 22, 2009

What is Michael Gebert reading?

This weekend's featured contributor at Writers Read: Michael Gebert, creator of the Chicago-based food video podcast and blog Sky Full of Bacon, and writer about food and media for various publications.

His entry begins:
After 9/11 I found it hard to read fiction. There were two reasons for this. One was a conviction that today's fiction writers simply weren't up to the task-- look at Updike's book about a terrorist in which he imagines him to be pretty much exactly like every other Updike protagonist, or John LeCarre's last ten unreadable anti-US screeds. The world was so much richer as revealed by non-fiction writers, from Bernard Lewis with his polymath understanding of the Arab world to books like Rise of the Vulcans or The Looming Tower, so full of complex real-life characters. Honestly, what novelist in the last 30 years has conjured up characters as compelling as The Looming Tower's main figures-- the philandering FBI goodfella John O'Neill, his should-be ally but bureaucratic archenemy the CIA terror geek Michael Scheuer, the pitiless intellectual Dr. Zawahiri, the aimless rich kid turned terror celebrity Osama Bin Laden? What a wonderful movie it would make, if Hollywood had the balls.[read on]
Visit Michael Gebert's website to learn more about Sky Full of Bacon and links to his writing about food and media.

Writers Read: Michael Gebert.

--Marshal Zeringue