This Recording a fine blog with a section on books

Sometime last year, I stumbled upon, This Recording, a blog, because they had a posting on True Blood, the HBO Sookie Stackhouse Vampire Series, and I was wondering what the "cool kids" were thinking about True Blood early on.  I'm a fan of True Blood, the HBO Series but I have not read the novels. I do have a small collection of favorite Vampire novels that I will write about someday, just not including those. The writers at This Recording knew of the books and were fans of the show, with reservations.  I was quickly drawn into other posts on This Recording and I decided to follow them and see where they took me.  Before long, I was mostly interested in their posts about Books and not their seemingly endless fascination with all things Mad Men.

I enjoy visiting This Recording especially on days when a new book posting appears.  Today, I read the posting by Alex Carnevale, Editor, concerning the newly released letters of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.  I'm not a huge fan of either and probably won't acquire a copy of the letters, but I certainly enjoyed the review by Carnevale and I tend to agree with the overall tenor of the review, that both Ginsberg and Kerouac were fatally flawed as writers and probably as humans. 

Here is the beginning of This Recording post: it is worth reading in full and it is worth paying attention to This Recording in general.

The Jew & The Goy
by ALEX CARNEVALE

As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit, or tell when we meet, but don't expect me to get excited by anything anymore.

The cultish obsession over Jack Kerouac, and to a lesser extent, Allen Ginsberg, has always been somewhat repulsive to me. Along with their revolting friend William Burroughs, the two shared an undeniable talent for writing, however unshapen and maladrous it was at times. Although Burroughs was the most talented of the three, they all wrote important but flawed works that undeniably captivated a great number of people.

The recently releasedletters of Kerouac and Ginsberg, edited in a spare and mysterious fashion by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, only reinforce this view. For many writers, the details of their biographies end up overshadowing the work itself. Since the work of Jack Kerouac consisted of a lengthy exaggeration of his real life that cast it in a more appealing light, this was never much of a problem. The fact that he ignored his biological daughter and every wife he had, drank himself to death, and was largely detested by many of the people he considered his friends moves out of focus...."