THE DEPRESSING N.Y. TIMES' BEST-SELLER BOOK LIST (and other notes...)

I was just perusing today's Sunday New York Times list of bestselling books, so that I could enjoy the fresh arrival at the #1 position on it of my dear friend John Berendt's City of Falling Angels.

But what a depressing best-seller list it is for what it tells us about the state of our culture. Here are the top 15 books sentient Americans are reading:

2 Kennedy-tragedy books, 2 show-biz memoirs, 2 conservative tracts (I include Tom Friedman's paean to globalization), a psychic book, a book on hunches, an assemblage of pseudo-economic factoids, a piece of bowdlerized feel-good pseudohistory (McCullough), a feel-good boyhood memoir about growing up in a bar, a book about picking up girls, and a book in favor of abolishing the income tax!

In fact, the only two books one would actually want to read on the list, the only two that are truly written and not simply manufactured are John Berendt's exquisitely polished tales from Venice, and the latest fascinating exploration of America's economic underside from another old friend, the admirable Barbara Ehrenreich (at left). This Times' best-seller list isn't a list of good writing, it's a list of word-processing......Yikes! Did I hear someone mutter about the decline and fall of an Empire?

PAKISTAN: MAN AND TEENAGER FACE EXECUTION FOR GAY MARRIAGE Today's Daily Telegraph reports from Pakistan: "A Pashtun tribesman who fell in love with and 'married' a 16-year-old boy faces summary execution in Pakistan after his "unholy union" provoked outrage among Islamic leaders. The 'marriage' between Liaquat Ali, 42, and teenager Markeen Afridi was conducted with all the ceremony of a conventional tribal wedding, including a troupe of singers and a feast. But guests who arrived at Nangrosa village in the Kyber Agency, 50 miles north of Peshawar, said yesterday that they were scandalised to discover that the 'bride' was a boy.....

"...As news of the scandal leaked out, Afridi tribal elders convened an emergency jirga (tribal council) yesterday to decide how to respond to the 'immoral and shameful act.'A tribal elder, Haji Namdar, recently returned from a year-long pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to impose a Taliban-style morality law on the area, some of the wildest and least accessible territory in Pakistan. Millat Khan Afridi, 56, an elder of the Afridi tribe, said he would be advocating the death penalty for the pair because they had held up the reputation of Islam and the tribe to ridicule and contempt.

'It is also common practice in such honour disputes for tribal delegations to march on the homes of the offending persons and set them ablaze as a warning to others...." You can read all of the Telegraph's somewhat snide article (it's a very conservative newspaper) by clicking here.