I’m back from 5 days in NYC. Has anyone gone to the American Museum of Natural History recently? I haven’t been in almost 20 years. They’ve redone all of the dinosaur exhibits and they’re great. I had a far better experience there than at the newly redone MoMA (not that I didn’t enjoy the MoMA, they’re just…well different). Dioramas galore! Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading on the web the past few days.

• An interesting article in the Globe about the ephemera Sara Theriault of Lorem Ipsum finds left behind in the used books she sells. Also mentioned is one of my colleagues here:
  

  Across town, Hilary Brant, the used-book buyer for the Harvard Book Store, isn’t so lucky. ”We haven’t lost interest” in displaying items found in books, she says, ”but we’ve run out of wall space.” Brant especially likes items evocative of a particular era, like photos of men from the ’60s wearing long hair and polyester. Taking home what she finds in books is a perk of her job. ”It’s the poor man’s antique collection,” she says.

• Some idiot has decided to make a biopic of fictitious author J.T. Leroy. Great. That’s just great.
• I had to drop Survey of Western Art my freshman year of college, but not before it was too late to return the doorstop that was the textbook, History of Art. I held onto that book for years—I had spent so much money on it. It moved from apartment to apartment, until I just couldn’t look at it anymore. Seems there’s a new and improved edition coming soon, according to this article. It’s interesting to hear about how they chose what artists to cut.
• The Morning News has announced the brackets and judges (not me again dammit) of their Tournament of Books. The Tournament begins in two weeks.
• Bookdwarf favorite Laila Lalami has written a review of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend for the March 20th edition of The Nation and a review of Amitav Ghosh’s Incendiary Circumstances for the Sunday Oregonian.
• The National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced.
• Scott Esposito has posted the Winter 2006 edition of The Quarterly Conversation, which includes essays, book reviews, and interviews.
• The new issue of Context from the Center for Book Culture is available online. This issue includes essays by Dubravka Ugresic and William Gass.
• The Orange Prize longlist has been announced. I’ve only read three of them embarassingly enough, but several of them have been on my TBR pile for a while. I think everyone should just stop publishing books for a year, so we can all catch up on our reading.
• I’ve just started reading the excellent Words Without Borders blog, which includes Dalkey Archive’s Chad Post writing about the London Book Fair. Funny stuff.
• I received my copy of the new literary journal A Public Space, edited by Brigid Hughes(ex-Paris Review editor). It looks great—fiction by Kelly Link, Charles D’Ambrosio (whose short story collection I am half way through and loving), Haruki Murakami, Rick Moody, Yoko Ogawa, Motoyuki Shibata, John Haskell, and Lucy Raven to name a few.

They say that sometimes you never miss something or someone until they’re gone. Well, Chuck’s absence has been felt here for a while. His diagnosis of a brain tumor came as a shock last January and he’s spent the last year fighting it. I’ve been lucky enough to work with him for the past 7 years here in the buying office. He’s probably one of the best people I’ve ever known or will ever know. Smart, funny, well-read, he’s brought his wonderful sensibilities to Harvard Book Store since 1994. He died at 12:48 Monday afternoon. This loss to the book world is immense. I’ve missed him every day he’s been gone, and I’m going to keep on missing him.

• I have 2 Robert Birnbaum links. The first is his interview with Andrew Delbanco, author of the recent Melville: His World and Work, which has been on my list for a while now. In the second link, Birnbaum recommends sevearl books worth checking out that you won’t find reviewed elsewhere.
• Opium Magazine has announced a fiction prize of $555 to celebrate their 5th anniversary.
• Ed has written a moving remembrance of Octavia Butler, who died earlier this week at the age of 58.

The Columbia Spectator, the newspaper of Columbia University, has a nice article on book criticism and how blogs are a great new forum, opening up the discussion on books.

• This profile of Deborah Eisenberg makes me even more determined to track down a copy of Twilight of the Superheroes (I love the cover).

Some fun stuff here:

• Robert Birnbaum sat down with James Lasdun, author of most recently Seven Lies. Topics discussed include Saul Bellow, the East coast, unicorns, and the state of literature.
• Scott McLee at Inside Higher Ed writes about love, sentiment, and Valentine’s Day.
• The CS Monitor takes a look at book-sharing sites, such as PaperBackSwap.com and FrugalReader.com.

Rupert Thomson will be blogging over at the LBC website sometime today, so if you have any questions for him, go on over and post them here. Ed has also posted his conversation with Thomson and you even get to hear me in the beginning(such a cliche to say, but I can’t believe I sound like that).

I’ll be attending tonight’s event with Bernard-Henri Levy at the First Parish Church here in Harvard Square (and hopefully recording it). I’ll at least have a report, if not the entire recorded event. I have to confess that I am only one quarter of the way through the book. Meanwhile, here are some links to keep you busy for the rest of the day:

• The Morning News has announced its list of books for the 2006 Tournament of Books. It’s an interesting if not predictable list.
• Ed Champion has made the new Bat Segundo podcast available for your listening pleasure. This time Bat takes on Jay Ryan. I know for a fact that Mr. Segundo has many more illustrious authors in the pipeline.
• Scott Esposito was lucky enough to attend City Arts & Lectures series a few days ago, where Lawrence Weschler spoke with Ricky Jay. Scott posted a nice recap of the evening.
• Boldtype #28 ‘The Film Issue‘ went up today.
• I enjoyed this article from the Guardian, where several people made a list of the must read books for children, including Philip Pullman and JK Rowling.
• Speaking of controversy (okay, I know I wasn’t, but I couldn’t think of a good segue), I’ve refrained from commenting on the whole James Frey affair, mostly because I thought the book was crap to begin with, but I loved Scott McLemee’s article on it in Inside Higher Ed.
• Robert Birnbaum spoke with both Bret Easton Ellis and Chip Kidd recently. Apparently Chip Kidd likes ballroom dancing. Who knew?
• Has everyone gone and checked out the LBC’s website? It’s full of book discussions, podcasts, interviews. Hell, we’ve even got the authors blogging (I am so hoping that Rupert Thomson agrees to blog).

I’m like the boyfriend/girlfriend who comes up to the bedroom but just wants to snuggle. I’ll have content soon. I am finishing up Michael Ruhlman’s delicious The Making of a Chef, which I am reading in preparation for his forthcoming book The Reach of a Chef. Ed and I are preparing something to do with David Mitchell’s coming of age tale Black Swan Green (it’s my fault we haven’t had anything sooner). Mitchell will be visiting my store in Cambridge and I hope to have audio of that reading as well as a short interview.
Next week, we will be hosting Bernard-Henri Lévy at the First Parish Church and again, I hope to have audio of that to post soon.

To keep you busy, why don’t you check out some of Robert Birnbaum’s stellar interviews with Chip Kidd or Bret Easton Ellis? If that doesn’t fill you up, check out Tito Perez’s nice rundown of an event with Stephen Elliot and Paul Auster. And if you’re still not full, have some laughs with Jonathan Ames’ reminiscence on cleaning out his refrigerator.

Did anyone else make dioramas for school projects when they were a kid? I loved making dioramas. I got to combine my love of books with my love for cutting things outand assmbling them. I remember making one for a book report on one of the Moominland books by Tove Jansson (have forgotten which one). It turns out they have a pretty awesome website. Even better Drawn & Quarterly, one of my favorite publishers (they are very nice and publish some of the most beautiful books these days. It’s all quality. They let the authors determine how they want their books to look), will be reprinting the comic strip Jansson did in 1954 in 5 volumes. I had to get the Moomins just right. They look like hippos, but are definitely not hippos. I even gathered real leaves and twigs to make a forest for them (yes, I was a perfectionist even back then). I was a devoted diorama maker, though not as obsessive as Lisa Simpson—no moving parts.

(Thanks Bookslut for the link)

The Litblog Co-op is pleased to announce its Winter 2005 READ THIS! Selection: Garner by Kirstin Allio. The weeks ahead will include chats with Allio and others involved in the publication of the book. We’ll also reveal the other 4 nominees with discussions of the pros and cons. Plus, our fearless Ed has interviewed all 5 authors and will provide them via podcast.

Monday January 16th, the LBC will be announcing the Winter 2005 Read This! pick. It’s an exciting group this round. I can’t reveal it yet, but it will be a surprise. This round we’ll be having podcasts of interviews with all of the authors of the 5 nominated books. So stay tuned. And I will resume regular posting next week. Okay, so I’ve never been a “regular” poster, but I am taking some literary Metamucil, so all things should resume.