Fast Food Nation, why do you get so much press?

Confession: I never much cared for the book Fast Food Nation. It framed everything as such a shock, and I wasn't that shocked. The Jungle it wasn't. Hell, it wasn't even The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I thought was more insightful.

Anyway. Apparently we're revisiting in. Boo, just lay down and die already, FFN.

The siren song of the bookstore

Some days it is hard to pass by the bookstore without getting juuuust one book. Sometimes you need to know when to quit buying, and to read what you already have.

I actually did this for about a year (not because I was being moral about book buying, but because all my money went to "housing" and "food" and other such things), and it was actually pretty fun.I read, among other things, Band of Brothers, The Bell Jar, World War Z, and half of Catch 22 until I wanted to stab out my eyes with a fork and quit. I finished books I had abandoned and titles with ugly covers that I had been avoiding (it turns out, they have very nice personalities!).

The best part was that it confirmed that I do, in fact, have great taste.

I am the savior of waterlogged books

So once, as an adorable and precocious child, I dropped a book into a lake, and convinced my dad that not only did I need that book, but I needed that exact, somewhat damp, copy. So my dad got the book from the polluted, Blinky infested, opaque waters, but by that time the waterlogged book was totally unreadable, which absolutely ruined my weekend, which I in turn ruined for the rest of my family. Because I'm charming!

If I had but known that wet books can be saved by freezing, I would have probably been less of a jerk. At that particular moment. Probably not overall.

A preemptive bookshelf eulogy

Woe to the world, reader types--the bookshelf is dead! Well, not actually, but it's coming. Ok, not really soon, but eventually. Russell Smith writes:

People come to see my minuscule new living room and say, hmm, you could have another foot and a half without that wall of bookshelves. True, but then you would never be able to distract yourself, while waiting for me to dress, by pulling down, at random, Weapons of World War II and 100 Erotic Drawings.

But you’d probably have brought your own e-reader with you, which you’d be looking at anyway (checking Facebook, updating: “I am so mad right now”). Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation....And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

After careful consideration, I think Smith is overreacting a little here. There will always been a need for secret bookcase passages, and a place to store trophies.

Dead pigs + the ocean = science

Why is science so gross and so cool all at the same time?

Surviving the great outdoors with skills developed in the great indoors

Are you a bookworm? Are you enthusiastic about the outside, but slightly, er, outdoors-ly challenged? Fear not--someone else has done the legwork of getting lost in the woods and trying different survival guides. And he lived to write the article!

So, next time you're stuck in the woods and happen to have internet, remember this post, so you can be linked to the article, so you can go to the nearest store and buy a survival guide. So you can survive.

Climate changing smut

You heard it first here: climate scientists made up global warming to up the sex factor in their novels. Dum dum duummmmmm. This is like Peter Parker level scientist gossip.

Thank you CKHB for the link (which she tells me is via Sierra Godfrey)! Your assiduous and meticulous coverage science will not go unrewarded. ...This is your reward.

Marginalia as a lifestyle choice

Toby Lichtig writes at the Guardian book blog about his love of writing in book margins–not just notes, but addresses, phone numbers, etc. He writes:

My flirtation with textual mutilation started off at school with primly creased corners and pencilled underlinings, but I soon progressed to cocksure highlighting and full-blown ink-on-paper action – the effluence of engagement, the living, livid trace of dialogue. If, as the poststructuralists have suggested, the act of reading is an act of violence, then scrawling across the page in cheap biro must be its logical corollary.

I'm not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of "marginalia" (a term coined in 1832 by that keenest of annotators, Samuel Taylor Coleridge). No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains. Personalising my books is an intrinsic part of the interaction (which is why I tend to be neurotic about holding on to what I've read). Perhaps it's the fault of my somewhat sluggish memory: the marks and scrawls help me to recall the text – and, crucially, the person I was when reading it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with.

While I don't tend to use my books as notebooks, I do tend to read and eat simultaneous, and can remember whole meals from the food stains as I reread (much ramen has been eaten in my lifetime). I think this system of self-memory only works for people who are book buyers, not borrowers, and big rereaders, but it's a nice way to pretend that you're not the egoist with the Moleskine–you're the reader who happens to take notes.

What killed Jane Austen? Cows.

I'm sure some of you thought that viruses jumping from animals to people was relatively new, a la bird flu or swine flu or AIDs (all: very bad). Well guess what? It's just drug-resistant forms of these diseases from the overuse of antibiotics in our food and lifestyles that's new!

There's a new theory that Jane Austen died from cow TB. And you know what? That is super lame. But, on the plus side, if you become a really famous author, dear reader, in 200 years people will come up with all sorts of theories about what killed you (hopefully not something terribly ironic, like a huge paper cut at a book signing).

Saving the environment one book at a time

I'm shaking my fist at you, Canada. You and your booksellers are always trying to one up America. You have two national languages, and publicly funded health care, and your dollar tried to beat up our American dollar. And now your booksellers are trying to force environmentalism by public shaming. Indigo wants publishers to report on the recycled status of their paper and what forest their paper comes from. Oh yea, Canada? Who's going to do that?

...Apparently Hachette. Okay. You win this one, Canada. Back to the Bat Cave.