Bulletin Board
With today being the end of Banned Books Week, regular programming here will resume next week.
The annual South Dakota Festival of Books is underway in Deadwood, although I’m sure the fact two “big names” with new releases — David Cross and Pete Dexter — canceled their appearances.
Blog Headlines of the Week
Americans acquire Castro (hockey team gets new defenseman)
And MobyLives has returned fully recharged from its August break:
Sarah Palin finishes book, asks what time royalty check will arrive
Blog Lines of the Week
Just in the [last] decade …, the decline in the quantitative measure of reviews, to say nothing of the qualitative measure, has been like watching the print equivalent of The Biggest Loser.
Anyone who thinks the Nobel Prize in Literature has anything to do with literature is deluding himself.
Good Stuff I Found In The Interweb Tubes
The anger of the festering fringe
Foreign Correspondents: International Reporting
Bookish Linkage
Janice Harayada of One-Minute Book Reviews examines backscratching in our time.
The Top 10 Most Depressing Books, as selected by the ABE customers. (Via.)
What a wonderful idea: More than 4,000 libraries in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will allow people to borrow items from public libraries regardless of where they live. The drawback? The item must be returned in the same area, although the group is working on a plan to allow items to be returned to any public library.
Your time to vote for the Not the Booker Prize Prize is running out.
The Millions releases the “honorable mention” winners and longlist (those books that were happy just to be nominated) for its best fiction of the millennium (so far).
Nonbookish Linkage
Justice Antonin Scalia tells C-SPAN: “I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.”
Seems like an oxymoron to me but here’s the 15 most stupid forehead tattoos.
Monty Python is 40 years old and The Twilight Zone is 50.
This can’t be good: We’ve Run Out of Planet for the Year .
China adopts a cash for clunkers program of sorts. I can hear the cries already: “See, Obama IS a socialist.”
Is it blasphemy to have overlooked International Blasphemy Day?
I happen to think the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply.
Rod Serling, 1967
