While You’re Eating, Perhaps You Should Go Here and Here and Here

June 3, 2010

It’s lunchtime! Ah, lunch. I am perpetually stymied by lunch. I love food like nobody’s business, but not lunch food. Or at least, not the kind of lunch food that comes cheap, like sandwiches and soup. I love Thai food and Chinese and sushi and tapas and Ethiopian and Mexican and Tex-Mex and Peruvian and Himalayan and Italian and I even like brats and state fair food like fried stuff on a stick and sweet corn, and breakfast food like omelets and hash browns and pancakes and real maple syrup…mmm. I mean, I really, really like to eat. It’s my favorite thing in the world next to reading, and it might even be on a par with that.

But lunch food just puts me off. It’s never good enough, and never quite what it should be. A really good sandwich is still just a really good sandwich, and you pay too much and the calories count is off the charts for so little payoff.  I usually end up with some boring-ass soup and sandwich combo, but today I’m trying to save cash by eating oatmeal. It’s the most boring, sad thing imaginable, so as I eat it I’m thinking about what to eat for dinner, and distracting myself by surfing the intertubes. Here are some things you, too, can enjoy, while you eat your lunch (which is hopefully better than oatmeal):

Greg Gerke has a post on Big Other asking for YOUR submissions for the best 20 writers under 40. Of course you’ve all heard about the New Yorker’s list by now, which I didn’t find too upsetting or too surprising, either. Greg would like to see more indie writers and small press authors get some love, and he’s going to post the final list later. So send him your favorite writers under 40. Do it!

Roxane Gay’s gorgeous piece at Spork now has its own gorgeous origin story, at JMWW.

Gary Lutz’s great review of a book I very much want to read, in the June Believer.

Enjoy your food and the reading.