Good Monday. There’s quite an assortment in my top picks for the week: two music journos (Greil Marcus and Courtney E. Smith), two graphic novelists (Daniel Clowes and Seth), some well known Catch-22 enthusiasts (incl. Christopher Buckley) and a zombie-lover (Colson Whitehead).

In Personal Reading news, I just finished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. The Virgin Suicides is one of my all-time favorite books, with its haunting plot and exquisite lines, and I remember feeling some disappointment over Middlesex—while it’s a great novel, it also seemed written by another author. The Marriage Plot continues the trend. While it has its merits, the book (which focuses on the love triangle of three privileged college kids) also lacks VS-era Eugenides. There was only one short passage that contains some of that old magic:

In Kalamata, Mitchell kept meeting his doppelgangers. The waiter at the restaurant, the boat repairman, the hotel owner’s son, the female bank teller: they all looked exactly like him. Mitchell even resembled a few icons in the crumbling local church. Instead of providing a sense of homecoming, the experience sapped Mitchell, as if he’d been photocopied over and over again, a faint reproduction of some clearer, darker original.

Next up on my list is Margaret Atwood’s Other Worlds.

Per READINGS:

MONDAY: Music journo legend Greil Marcus discusses his latest bio The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.

TUESDAY: Graphic novelists Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) and Seth will present their newest works—The Death-Ray and The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, respectively—at their only NY-event.

WEDNESDAY: Happy 50th, Catch-22! Christopher Buckley (Thank You for Not Smoking) will discuss the book with Robert Gottlieb (Catch-22’s original editor) and Mike Nichols (who adapted it to film).

THURSDAY: Colson Whitehead will read  from his latest, zombie-fest Zone One, at Greenlight.

FRIDAY: Courtney E. Smith will share her top-five lists, crazy musician stories and guilty pleasures (Pussycat Dolls!) all found in Record Collecting for Girls (subtitle: Unleashing your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time).