The Economist is not so keen on Haruki Murakami’s running memoir.

Recommended.

At the London Review of Books, Jacqueline Rose reviews Bernhard Schlink’s Homecoming.

The New York Sun has the long list for this year’s Man Booker prize.

In the New York Times, Motoko Rich examines the erosion of literacy in America.

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Not recommended.

The Daily Yomiuri has an article on combini novels, works of literature with manga elements added to lure readers.

Surely no boy of 9 could ever conceive of artfully juxtaposing an account of Nero’s oft-frustrated attempts to assassinate his mother with the boy’s own disillusionment upon discovering his mum canoodling with one of their married hosts?

At Salon Laura Miller reviews Matthew Kneale’s When We Were Romans.

You don’t have to read these books to imagine the outcome: girl meets guy; girl gets guy but first she has to discuss him endlessly with her gal friends and perhaps Mother, who is typically a dragon or an ex-supermodel or both.

It seems that even the target audience has tired of chick lit.

Christopher Hitchens undergoes waterboarding and writes about the experience for Vanity Fair.

Slate has a collection of photographs of Hemingway.

Recommended with reservations.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Jonathan Segura’s Occupational Hazards.

In the Guardian, Salman Rushdie boasts of speed signing.

“I did have the support of experienced staff at Ingrams book distributors in Nashville, (and at many other US bookstores), who will confirm that among the fastest present-day signers of books are President Jimmy Carter, the novelist Amy Tan, and myself,” he said.

At The New Yorker, Adam Kirsch writes of John Keats’s obsession with fame and death.

Kay Ryan is now the poet laureate of the United States.

In the Financial Times, Gillian Slovo reviews Damon Galgut’s The Impostor.

Among the many layers of this ominously compulsive world – a world where the active make good and the passive are lost – everything is misnamed. Just as the new political order in the form of the town’s oddly ineffectual black mayor has re-christened the town, so does Adam’s neighbour sit uneasily in his frightened disguise.

Recommended.

“I hear she slept with absolutely everyone, and during your separation, no less,” someone else tells him. “Most people have the sense to wait till the final paperwork is done. But from Day 1 it was like she was on spring break.”

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Michael Dahlie’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living.

Do you despise choppy modern forms of communication such as text messaging? There is nothing wrong with the model, Luddite. The problem is your vocabulary.

At the Powell’s Books blog, used book buyer Kirsten Berg writes of edges.

At the Los Angeles Times, Lee Drutman reviews Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.

Recommended with reservations.

Laura Miller at Salon probes Barack Obama’s reading history.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he’d given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

However you choose to tell it, it’s an extraordinary American family story, stretching from the 1820s to World War I. First there’s the pioneering tale of the founding grandfather, William, an Ulster immigrant and self-made Albany businessman. Then, the eccentric and domineering personality of Henry James Sr., high-minded, spiritually questing, unemployed, nomadic, scarred by the amputation of his leg in childhood, his “inward demons” and his breakdown in his 30s (or, in the Swedenborgian terms he adopted, his “vastation”). . . .

In the New York Times, Hermione Lee reviews Paul Fisher’s House of Wits, a collective biography of the James family.

Not recommended.

In The Korea Times, Chung Ah-young covers a study by South Korea’s Literature Translation Institute on the quality of English translations of Korean literature.

According to the project, only 10 percent, or seven, among the 72 translated works scored an A in high reliability. Two thirds were evaluated as non-reliable (grade B to C) translations. There were no grade A+ works.

Jenny Diski’s travelogue appears at the London Review of Books.

Not recommended.

At The Guardian’s books blog David Barnett wonders why we have so little interest in independent writers.