• The deadline to apply to be a book-giver on World Book Night has been extended to Monday.

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes (this week)

• Burning Man (“Kneeling there, on fire, he’d resigned himself to death. All he’d wanted to know was how long? How long would he have to burn? How many more torturous fractions of a second would he have to remain alive?”) (via)
• Stories don’t need morals or messages (“For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit.”)
• A Message from Prison (“…the schizophrenic seeks salvation from his suffering the way a person drowning seeks a gulp of air.”)

More Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes (that I accidentally omitted last week)

• The Long Goodbye (“What’s so crazy is that medical science is keeping people alive longer. We just won’t be able to afford to live—we’ll be a nation full of immortal poor people.”) (via)
• How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth? (“Neither Columbus nor Lewis and Clark would have imagined demanding 99.999 percent safety assurances as a precondition for their expeditions. Under such a standard, no human voyages of exploration would ever have been attempted.”) (via)

Blog Headlines of the Week

• Drug tests for welfare recipients, Sanity tests for legislators
• So Jonathan Franzen Hates eBooks…Who Cares?

Blog Lines of the Week

• “Reviewing books is often a good way to feel like a puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. And sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you can feel like a crazy, puppy-kicking sonuvabitch.”

Bookish Linkage

• What I Hate About Being A Reader
• 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore
• The greatest books of all time, according to 125 famous authors
• Some photographers are planning a fine-art photo coffeetable book about life on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. According to their web site, they probably won’t finish shooting until this fall.
• An Ivy Leaguer’s view of how to read the right books.

Nonbookish Linkage

• I REALLY want one of these.
• Naturally, golf etiquette requires rules in case the Nazis bomb the golf course while you’re playing.
• Conversations with the parents of Russia’s neo-Nazis (via)

Spam-bot Comment of the Week

• “These deppresants are wrongly sometimes writtenabated to as travelers? diarrhea.” (January 31 comment to my annual Christmas post)

Daniel Stern, The Rose Rabbi

• Torturer’s Apprentice (“… the [Bush] administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.”)
• 10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free (“Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely.”)

Blog Headline of the Week

• Ghost of Princess Diana haunts Glasgow church, entire damn planet is rapt

Blog Line of the Week

• “For every 50 words of sense, there are 5,000 words of bombastic blather.”

Bookish Linkage

• Now Elaine Benes learned War and Peace wasn’t originally called War, What Is It Good For?, the truth is The Great Gatsby might have been called The High-Bouncing Lover.
• A case against reading the classics
• Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Nonbookish Linkage

• The Man Who Bought North Dakota (via)
• What? There really isn’t a huge triangular UFO headed to Earth???? (via)

Bot Comment of the Week

• “This magnificent phrase is necessary just by the way” (entirety of January 14 comment to my post on my favorite books of 2011)

John Lennon, Playboy interview, September 1980

• In the Land of the Non-Reader (“As a non-reader I felt free to happily non-think all day.”) (via)
• The Remains of an Illegal and Immoral War (“The rate of birth defects in Fallujah is 14 times the rate after our nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II!”)

Bookish Linkage

• The Economist has a Q&A with my favorite Scandinavian author, Per Petterson. Among the gems: “We are locked up in our own minds, although we instinctively reach out to each other for compassion, solidarity, understanding, and we often succeed, it should not be forgotten.” (via)
• Gee, I’m part of the Bermuda Book Review Triangle
• Toni Morrison’s Beloved is supposedly written to about a fifth-grade reading level, one of the reasons it is being challenged in Michigan.
• A U.K. literati says “the useful art of skimming” is justified because “there are some passages in great novels that are so profoundly boring they should not detain our attention.”
• The Tournament of Books has begun. (I’ve read three of the “Sweet 16.”)

Nonbookish Linkage

• My friend and former RCJ colleague Mike Sanborn makes some honest observations on Bill Janklow that I haven’t really seen elsewhere in the media or blogosphere.
• North Dakota tries to be cool, fails
• The Red Flags of Quackery (via)
• Great moments in regulatory idiocy
• New research suggests heavy Facebook users are more likely to believe other people have happier lives.

Bot Comment of the Week

• “i think im pregnant” (January 7 comment to my post on my favorite books of 2011)

Benjamin Disraeli

• Why you don’t really have free will (“Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.”) (via)
• The death of the celebrity memoir (“If we really wanted these annoying figures to go away, the solution is pretty simple: Stop paying attention to them.”)

Best Blog Headlines of the Week

• White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars (via)
• James Franco writing a novel about favorite subject James Franco

Best Blog Post of the Week

• Mary Doria Russell regrets any damage her pro-lavender statement may have caused.

Bookish Linkage

• On Not Reading — and this happens to me a lot.
• Why is the list of the most downloaded ebooks from libraries so different from the bestselling ebooks lists? (via)
• A UK survey suggests one of every 40 adults was given an ereader for Christmas, 92% of which were Kindles.
• Dreams of Space – Non-fiction children’s books about space flight from 1945-1975 (via).
• Facebook vs. Real Book (via)

Nonbookish Linkage

• Search when words and phrases showed up in U.S. Supreme Court cases.
• 2011 psychic prediction fails. I’m sure the list psychic prediction hits is minuscule in comparison. (via)

Chuck Palahniux, Damned