Much to post about, both good (trip to Orlando! Simon Pegg signing!) and not so good (I need to retake my second French oral exam! I screwed up my 1040 and owe Uncle Sam ~$5K!), but in the meantime,

Here's an interview with Norton Juster, who wrote THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH and THE DOT AND THE LINE.

From a chapter on "Some Queer Japanese Superstitions" in The Nightless City: Geisha and Courtesan Life in Old Tokyo:
Sneezing denotes:-
Once,-Some person is secretly praising you;
Twice,-Some person is backbiting you;
Thrice,-Some person is in love with you;
Four times,-You have caught a cold.

Actually, what I really want right now is a computer with a 3-D display. I've been re-reading The Count of Monte Cristo and got the notion to diagram the characters' relationships in a flowchart. OH MY GOD. So far the results have looked like something spun by a spider after five Turkish coffees ( Read more... )

Spoke too soon re: the cough. I feel like a wuss complaining about this when there are people on my friends list who are much worse off, health-wise, but earlier I went into a coughing fit so violent that I pulled a muscle over my ribcage, I think - it hurts when I inhale too deeply ( Read more... )

I’m currently working my way through the Biography of Manuel by James Branch Cabell - at least, I’m doing the best I can given that my Cabelliana does not include the Storisende Edition and the volumes I do possess are a hodgepodge of editions. Today’s book is The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck (1915), and I was tickled by the scene in which the ( Read more... )

From an interview at io9.com on the future of books in an increasingly digital world:
io9: Will new online formats change the format of the novel?PNH: I have a severe Google Reader habit. I think people will use blog forms and twitter to contrive fiction. Here's an interesting thing online: The explosion of fanfic. I don't read much, but back in ( Read more... )

In response to ceindreadh’s query, “Top five warm and fuzzy moments.”

I decided to put them in an unnumbered, newest-to-oldest list. So:

• Ianto and Jack talk and kiss at the end of “To the Last Man” (Torchwood, season two, ep. 3). The kiss itself is wonderful, but what makes me go awww is the conversation preceding it: Ianto admits he’d miss Jack if he ( Read more... )

File under “happy coincidence”: this morning on the train I finished re-reading one of my favorite historical romances, Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. Tonight, on TCM? The 1952 Hollywood movie based on same, which is not an entirely satisfactory adaptation but does have an epic 10-minute swordfight in a crowded theater between Stewart Granger as ( Read more... )

From Wil Wheaton’s blog:

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London

Launching in London today, the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you waitIt's not elegant and it's not sexy - it looks like a large photocopier - but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since ( Read more... )

Courtesy of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books:
Amazon RankFunction: verb ( Read more... )