Seriously, thank God

In Wisconsin, that one state you always confuse with Minnesota and occasionally Missouri, if you don’t return books to the library, especially ones that you can buy for a handful of pennies at every store in America, then you will be handcuffed and taken down to the station to smile in a really cute way and then have everyone wish you’d get rid of the nose ring or at least the eyebrow piercing. This girl didn’t return two library books, White Oleander and Angels & Demons, so she got arrested and the had to pay a fine of 180 dollars. Is this the only damn library in the whole state? And yes, she got to keep the books.

Sharon Osbourne has decided to let her ghost writer put out a fiction book. The plot is going to involve reality TV. Instead of writing a 200+ word diatribe about this book, I’m just going to post
this.

Some story about what bestsellers say about whatever country they’re bestselling in. Newsflash: Every country likes to read dumb stuff.

You know what I love about blogs? How insanely depressing they can be. Thanks, Enter the Octopus.

Via Conversational Reading, here is Hitchens reviewing Mailer’s accounts of the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1968. Reading this will make you smarter.

So Google, which is evil and should be stopped at any cost even though I use it every forty seconds, has an employee that isn’t evil because she saved a bookstore. What they don’t mention is that all the employees are child laborers.

A profile on Zyzzyva and its editor Howard Junker, the only person to have posted a legitimately angry comment about something I wrote. At least he wrote a comment.

In the last day I’ve seen “listicles” on three different websites. What the Hell?

And finally, one more story about libraries that is also from Gawker because they’re actually pretty decent with literature news even though I hate them. A woman published a book about how many crazies come into her library and now she’s been fired because she wrote a bunch of mean crap about the crazies. I completely understand for her getting fired, except I highly doubt anyone she poked fun at would have read the book. When was the last time you went into a library and actually saw someone reading an actual book?

Posted Sat, 23 Aug 2008 16:52:10 and filed under Shane, Writing, Awards, Authors, Writers. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.