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• Farewell essay: On the love of paper and ink and glue, and words on a printed page.

  Number of comments: 10
  Any number of topics presented themselves for what may be my last little essay here — it’s been a busy week in book land — but I’ve decided to mingle the elegiac with the celebratory. Yes, I could have written about the latest atrocity by Amazon, a company that, astonishingly [...]
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• A Hunger Games cookbook may sound like a contradiction in terms. Not.

  Number of comments: 2
  I don’t know if it’s true that there are no atheists in foxholes, but I am pretty sure there won’t be any vegetarians in a society like Suzanne Collins describes in The Hunger Games. Let’s be honest: Hungry people will eat anything, especially in rural areas where items we don’t [...]
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• Russell Hoban wrote books that blurred the line between fantasy and literature

  One of the 20th century’s vast number of unjustly neglected novelists, Russell Hoban, died yesterday at age 86 — a development he foresaw with his customary wit as “a good career move.” As the Guardian reports in an excellent if too-brief obit, Hoban told an interviewer in 2002 that his death would [...]
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• William Gibson’s pattern recognition skill is rooted in1950s Appalachia.

  Number of comments: 4
  The visionary sci-fi writer who coined the term “cyberspace” while most of us still worked on typewriters traces his unique perspective to an isolated, bookish childhood in a small Blue Ridge mountain town. “I’m a guy from a really tiny culture in a specific part of Virginia,” Gibson told me [...]
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• Dickens for Dummies: Making the classics safe for today’s dimwitted tots.

  Number of comments: 4
  When Jesse Kornbluth’s daughter found A Christmas Carol boring, the former editorial director at AOL decided to improve Dickens by gutting 15,000 words out of it. Now he wants to do the same for your stupid kid. Fifteen thousand words out of a text that’s only 28,000 to begin with. [...]
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• Won’t you please leave Jane Austen alone please? I’m serious. This means you.

  Number of comments: 2
  Everything you may hear or read about Jane Austen must best be approached with a wary eye — except, of course, for the greatness of her six novels. This is, alas, not a truth universally acknowledged. On the contrary. Fresh news regarding some aspect of Jane’s life or work or [...]
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• Bum fight! Alan Moore and Frank Miller in a lefty-righty feud over Occupy Wall Street.

  Number of comments: 1
  Before I get into this feud between two comic book gods, someone please tell me why they look like hobos? Frank Miller looks like an angry homeless man, while Alan Moore looks like he mutters to himself a lot. Okay, to be fair Miller, creator of Sin City and recreator [...]
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• Grumpy Monday: Free information, bogus Gods, and HuffPo wastes more time.

  Number of comments: 2
  I woke up cheerful, but  a few minutes on the Internet took care of that. Stories about a white man’s search for God, how information “wants” to be free, and yet another utterly meaningless piece at HuffPo have soured my mood. Let me start with Jeffrey Rosen’s New York Times [...]
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• Word of the Year: ‘Tergiversate.’ Yeah, that’ll catch on.

  Number of comments: 2
  No, I’ve never heard or read it, either. I can only assume the lexicographers at Dictionary.com are chained to  workstations in the bowels of a medieval castle somewhere and thus do not get out much. “Tergiversate,” according to this HuffPo piece, is pronounced ”ter-JIV-er-sate,” and means “to change repeatedly one’s attitude or [...]
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• David Milich gets his !@#$%^&* hands on Faulkner. Will literature survive?

  I can see it now: Ian McShane as Flem Snopes, scheming his way to prosperity and ruin, plus bare butts, copious poetic cussing, graphic violence, and the other niceties Milch bestowed upon a grateful nation in Deadwood and NYPD Blue. Wow. When I think of it that way, maybe Milich [...]
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