"Soul Mining gives insights into the making of music I found unique from any other book out there."

"Version Control is perhaps the strangest fictional work of appropriated voices and subjects. It’s set in a surreal near future — or several near futures — as well as in several pasts. Though issues of race play virtually no role in the stories, one character, an African-American physicist, recalls dropping out of a writing course because the professor thought he should be mining his heritage instead of inventing science fiction."

"Clouzot’s gripping film about a group of men driving a truck full of nitroglycerine to end a mining disaster is, although it could not be more French, one of the great buddy pictures of all time, with a degree of white-knuckle suspense that has never been bettered, before or sense. It is, or could be, an elegy to the French film industry, which in its heyday could produce films of every kind that captured an international audience, and is now pretty much reduced to love stories or French comedies that, with rare exceptions, seldom seem funny to foreigners."

"I don’t really read Stephen King—I just can’t read scary things because it stays with me too long—but I truly liked his memoir of the craft of writing. It’s the most accurate depiction of what writing is like and it’s not necessarily glamorous the way we’ve seen it on “Sex and the City,” where you sit down and bang out an article in 30 minutes. He’s good at mining his personal life and letting that inspire his creativity. That’s the ideal way to go about writing, to be informed by your life and use it in a way that can entertain other people."