Slow Book Coming

Two years ago, I read the following news with interest and growing excitement:

Bob Dylan fans will finally have a chance to read the singer’s real back pages, and then some. Dylan is penning a multivolume autobiography, with the first installment due sometime in 2002.

Since then, I’ve watched the pub date for Chronicles, Volume 1 (modestly projected at a scant 208 pages) crawl further and further away, and now it looks like the book that was supposed to come out last year won’t even come out next year. Amazon.com’s most informed guess for a release date is now January 2005.

If this book ever does go to press, I wonder if Simon & Schuster will even bother including the overly optimistic Volume 1 in the title. At this rate, it’s pretty ambitious to think that Bob will live long enough to fulfill that implied promise.

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