Things I'd Like to See This Weekend on C-SPAN's "Book TV"

Saturday
11:00 am Ate, Prayed, Loved, Then...
Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the pressure attendant upon her to deliver a suitable follow-up to her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. This week the New York Times reported that Gilbert completed, then scrapped a 500-page manuscript last year, and that she had since written an entirely different book, Committed, about marriage. Now Gilbert announces that she has finally hit upon the right idea for her sophomore effort, one that is guaranteed to replicate the success of Eat, Pray, Love by tapping into the most successful trend in publishing at the moment--flesh-eating zombies. Her new book, Eat Prey Live, will recount Gilbert's violent, bloody encounters with hordes of the hungry living dead in the jungles of southeast Asia. "There's something very scary about having millions of people waiting to see what you're going to do next," she told the Times. Here she adds, "that's not nearly as scary as having hundreds of undead cannibalistic fiends trying to eat your intestines."

Sunday
10:00 am Airplane Read
Alain de Botton talks about his experiences as Heathrow Airport's first "writer in residence." De Botton agreed to spend a week at the airport, writing about what he saw and pissing off a lot of other writers who were stuck at Heathrow but weren't getting paid for it. Mr. de Botton reports that the experiment got off to a rocky start--he had just begun typing his observations when a flight attendant asked him to turn off his laptop and other electronic devices. Mr. de Botton's reporting will be turned into a short book called A Week at the Airport--an apt title, as it is possible to spend a week at Heathrow on any given day. The publisher says the book will capture the arrivals and departures, the greetings and farewells, the delays, the lines, the tedium, and all the other things that make you want to avoid going to the airport in the first place. 10,000 copies will be given away to Heathrow travelers; the book will then go on sale at just about the same time those first 10,000 copies are hitting Amazon as "used books." Publication date is September 21, though the book could be delayed due to heavy weather conditions over Albuquerque.

2:00 pm Obscure Dickens
A series profiling lesser-known Dickens characters. This week: Josephus Shyster, successful barrister from A Tale of Two Cities who tires of urban life and retires to two suburbs.