I have an old friend who subscribes to the print edition of the NY Times. She saw an article in the Book Review last week that she thought I’d be interested in. Her initial impulse was to cut it out and “snail mail” it to me. She’s done this occasionally in the past, and it’s always nice to get an unexpected letter in the mail with an article clipped out of a newspaper. That’s not something people do much these days, but it’s kind of cool.
She’s gotten a little more familiar with modern technology over the last few years, though, so instead she texted me and asked if I still subscribed to the Times. I told her I had a digital subscription. So she then gave me the page number and title of the article, so I could look it up and read it. The article in question was this review of the new book from Gabriel García Márquez. I’d already heard about it, and that it was being published against his wishes, and that it probably wasn’t very good. The review was interesting, and basically confirmed my belief that I really don’t want to read it.
My friend also told me that there was a little sidebar article under the heading “From Our Archives” that I would find interesting. And here’s where I went down a rabbit hole. You can find most of the articles from the print version of the Times by going to the Today’s Paper link. From there, I got to the Book Review section from March 31. But I guess the “From Our Archives” thing was just a filler sidebar that they didn’t bother putting online. So them I remembered that there was a way of accessing a facsimile of the printed edition. That led me to the replica edition that’s available via PressReader. It seems that you need a print subscription to access that though; you can’t get to it with just a digital subscription. I remembered too that I can get some stuff from PressReader with my library card, but I logged in that way, and found that it doesn’t include NY Times access.
Then, later, I remembered TimesMachine. That does work for digital subscribers, but it only goes as far as 2002. In the end, I decided to stop by the library today and browse their print copy of last week’s Sunday paper. In it, I found that the sidebar in question was basically a summary of the 1988 Thomas Pynchon review of Love in the Time of Cholera. I can find that review a few ways. A web search led me to this archived page. A slightly different search led me to this page, which includes a link to the TimesMachine version. (And now I realize that I can print out that archive version and snail mail it to my friend, so she can see it too! Back to the old ways…)
And all that searching also led me to The Essential Gabriel García Márquez, an article from almost exactly a year ago, which serves as a summary of his life and a guide to his books. I should make a point of coming back to that, at some point. I’ve only read One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
So that’s my NY Times rabbit hole for today. This also got me reminiscing about my college years and early post-college years, which are, now, more than 25 years ago! I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude for a contemporary literature class, and Love in the Time of Cholera on my own, probably over the summer between my junior and senior years. (It was published in April 1988, apparently, and I remember buying it as a “new release” in hardcover, so that makes sense.)
And I’m pretty sure this friend is familiar with Márquez because I gave her a copy of one or the other of those books, or at least had a conversation with her about them. Which is why she thought of me when she saw the review last weekend. So that was all fun and a nice reminder of old friends and old books.
Meanwhile, in our current timeline, I’m still shamelessly hip-deep in The Path of Daggers, the eighth Wheel of Time book. All this Times browsing got me wondering if the Times ever reviewed Path of Daggers. A little searching reveals that it did! Here’s the article on TimesMachine, and here’s the full text. It’s interesting to see a mainstream review of this book from back when it was published, in 1998. It’s less snarky than I would have expected from the Times. I liked the summary of the internet fandom around the series at the time: “There is an Internet Usenet group devoted to speculations about its plot lines and its puzzles…” Usenet! I hadn’t thought about Usenet in years! There are, of course, Tolkien comparisons. That’s inevitable. And there are some observations about the book (and the series as a whole) that are pretty interesting. (And no spoilers, which I appreciate.)