Ian McEwan is the subject of a Q&A in The New Republic that ranges from the perils of movie adaptations, the worth of literary realism, and McEwan’s rarely concealed view on religion.

McEwan also offers his thoughts on book blogs:

I don’t read the blogs much. I don’t like the tone “ the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don’t like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can’t be held accountable, when they don’t have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn’t belong in the world of book reviewing.

Thanks for that, you weedy, four-eyed, knee-jerk atheistic, Booker Prize recidivist.

It’s an interesting read, but we have to note “ from way up on our high blog-horses “ the fact that the occasion for the interview was not the recent publication of McEwan’s latest novel On Chesil Beach, but rather the fact that the film adaptation of Atonement was up for a bunch of Golden Globe awards.