It’s not all bad news all the time here at Literary Smackdown. Sometimes, writers who have detested each other with a novelistic intensity just … get over it. This is what seems to have happened over the weekend at the Hay Festival, in Wales, when Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul ended a fifteen-year feud with a handshake and a little help from Ian McEwan. The Guardian reports:

Spotting Naipaul in the green room at the Hay festival, Theroux turned to McEwan and asked what he should do. “Life is short,” McEwan replied. “You should say hello.” And with that, handbags were holstered.

It really must have been some handshake. I’ve always thought that there are certain things a friendship never comes back from, and the Theroux-Naipaul spat seemed to have many of them. One of the things is suspecting a friend of seducing one’s spouse; one is selling a sentimental gift from a friend online for a hefty profit; one is writing an unflattering book about a friend; and one is coming to believe that a friend is a terrible person. These are the general contours of the spat, reported ad nauseam in the press and artfully by Theroux in the aforementioned book, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents.” The story goes that Naipaul suspected Theroux of trying to seduce his wife, Pat, and retaliated by selling an inscribed copy of one of Theroux’s books online for $1,500, after which Theroux published his unflattering account of his friend. Even before all of these major dramas, though, the friendship was testy. Here's how Naipaul described it as it was in the late nineteen-sixties:

He was an absolute bore…. Theroux didn’t know what he thought about anything. He had no views…. But he pestered me with letters, long letters being written to me every two or three weeks at a certain time.

Nevertheless, the two kept up a relationship for decades. Perhaps they have a higher tolerance for brutal honesty than most of us? Theroux seemed to say as much in a response to Ian Buruma’s N.Y.R.B. review of Patrick French’s “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul,” which touched on the spat, in 2009:

Mr. Buruma calls my book Sir Vidia’s Shadow a “rather bitter memoir.” He is entitled to his opinion. I think of it as an unsparing and accurate portrait of the man, minus the instances of racism and physical abuse that I was forbidden by lawyers to publish. Mr. Buruma speaks of Naipaul’s “great modesty.” In thirty years of knowing the man I was never privileged to observe this. I mainly saw his sadness, his tantrums, his envy, his meanness, his greed, and his uncontrollable anger. But I never saw Naipaul attack anyone stronger than himself; he talked big and insultingly but when he lashed out it was always against the weak—women who loved him, his wife, and waiters: people who couldn’t hit back, the true mark of the coward.

The question that comes to mind after reading that is why or how the two would want to put their dispute behind them. French’s biography holds a clue: it, too, contains extremely unflattering details about Naipaul (his extramarital affairs, his habit of hiring prostitutes, his hot temper), but it was, as advertised, authorized by Naipaul, who made no changes to the final manuscript. In his review of the biography in the magazine, James Wood wrote that it was “extraordinary” because French had access to “searching interviews with Naipaul, whose candor is formidable: as always, one feels that while Naipaul may often be wrong, he is rarely untruthful, and, indeed, that he is likely to uncover twenty truths on the path to error.” Buruma called the book the first entry in the genre of “confessional biography,” and I suppose it’s possible that Naipaul has come to view Theroux’s book as a sort of precursor to a story he himself wanted told. It will be interesting to see whether the handshake is the beginning of a full reconciliation or just a blip, the accidental meeting of two estranged friends who forgot for a moment—but only a moment—what all the fuss was about.

Tessa Hadley, the author of this week’s story, discusses her work with Deborah Treisman, the magazine’s fiction editor. Subscribers can read the story online, and in our tablet edition, where they can also listen to a recording of Hadley reading “Clever Girl.”

Like “Honor,” a story of yours that was published in The New Yorker in January, “Clever Girl” is one in a series of pieces about a girl named Stella, growing up in Bristol in the nineteen-sixties. When “Honor” came out, you had written four Stella stories: “Honor” was the first; “Clever Girl” is the third. Are there more now?

Yes, I’m in the middle of story No. 6: she’s living in a commune in the nineteen-seventies, with two children. And Stella hasn’t let me down yet—there’s something about her character that attracts drama and high-pitched emotion. Everything that happens to her is shapely, falls into meaningful form. She tells all the stories herself, in the first person; I haven’t written much in the first person before, but somehow it was always essential to these stories that she do her own telling. The way she interprets her life for us—full of turning points, each event urgently meaningful—that’s her character. And then it becomes more than her character; for people who read their own lives in that charged-up way, the charged-up telling becomes the truth: life really falls into those strong shapes, those dramas. It’s a kind of magic: psychological magic, in which the mind acts powerfully to affect the external world. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I find great romance in Stella’s life—because she does. Told in a different idiom, hers could be a fairly humdrum narrative. Idiom is everything. Really, I think of Stella almost as a girl warrior, on a modern quest—even though her fights are all quite ordinary, domestic ones. In “Clever Girl,” like a hero in a fairy tale, she discovers her secret weapon, the talent she didn’t even know she had—her intelligence.

Do you find that the later pieces—which deal with an older version of Stella—have influenced how you see the first few stories now?

I don’t know about that. As we grow older and accumulate history, it doesn’t change what our childhood was, unless we’re tampering with the narrative—we can’t go back and change things in the past, according to what happens later. So the sequence of events in a novel or a series of stories should reflect that reality: what’s laid down early can’t be altered by what comes after it. But I’m being a little disingenuous—a fiction isn’t life, and writers are authorised to tamper. Almost anything could have developed, however, out of the early chapters of Stella’s life. Her sense that everything that happens to her is important doesn’t mean that the later events are determined by the early ones. What I’m saying, longwindedly, is that I haven’t been tempted yet to revisit earlier chapters, to put in anything that explains or underlines what happens later. I prefer the model of our growth in time—infinitely more happens to us than can be explained by any search for origins.

Why did you choose to write this book in this way—as a string of distinct, self-contained episodes or scenes drawn from different periods of Stella’s life?

This character of the narrative—like the telling in the first person—seemed to be there from the very beginning. I suppose there’s something in Stella’s character that sees her adventures in this picaresque, episodic way. (Actually, if I ever read that a contemporary novel is picaresque I tend to avoid it, thinking it’s going to be smugly comical, so perhaps I ought to use that word warily.) She enters so intensely, with such thorough commitment, whatever scenario she falls into; her imagination is narrow and deep, rather than working in long arcs, connected sequences of cause and effect. Most of us, in fact, tend toward this kind of deep absorption in our present condition, though we like to think we’re keeping a lookout for the longer haul. Our present situation absorbs us, seems, for as long as it lasts, to be life itself, a bedrock. Then change comes—sometimes gradually and naturally, sometimes violently or through arbitrary accident—and the once-ordinary life is lost to us, becomes the irrecoverable past, missed or regretted or left behind with relief, but, mostly, forgotten. Life itself, like a sequence of stories, is episodic. On the other hand, it’s Stella who connects up the various things that happen to her, who weaves her whole narrative together and makes it add up.

Your portrait of the relationship between Nor, the well-intentioned, somewhat hapless stepfather, and his mildly rebellious step-daughter, Stella, feels pitch-perfect to me—as does the slow shift in perspective in Stella as she ages, her sense, as an adult, that she actually would like and respect Nor, if she met him now. Is there anything of you, or someone you’ve known, in these characters?

It’s not from my own life, no. As to where it comes from—who knows? Bits stolen from all over the place, as always. Writers are thieves, not to be trusted. I’m glad that in time Stella is able to be imaginative about her stepfather, to see beyond her passionate struggle against him, which was necessary in its moment. I don’t think you could narrate a whole sequence of stories through someone who didn’t have that kind of generosity and reason. No, I’m wrong; of course you could. Writers themselves don’t have to have generosity or reason. I always think of Jean Rhys as a testing example. She’s a wonderful writer. But she isn’t reasonable or balanced. The balance is all in the sentences. Very interesting.

You seem to be drawn to adolescence as a subject—the rawness, the selfishness, and the vulnerability of that stage of life. What is it that keeps you returning to that territory?

Well, it’s delicious stuff to write. Everything is open, I suppose. Anything can happen. It’s a moment in life in which the outward forms aren’t fixed—adolescents, even the ones who’ll conform later, turn such a coolly skeptical eye on what their elders hand down as prescription. In a way, they’re all anthropologists, watching the tribe, wondering where to jump, to join in. I like to think of the fiction writer as a kind of anthropologist. The risks that adolescents take are the places where stories bloom, rents in the fabric of the known.

What effect do you think Stella’s revelation of her own intelligence will have on her life? Is it a positive force, or a more ambiguous one?

It will be a double-edged sword, of course. (If I’m calling her a woman warrior, she should have a sword.) She’s a girl, for a start. So being intelligent will be fraught for her. Things will happen to her physically that may make her resent her intelligence and thrust it away. It looks, in “Clever Girl,” as though she should have a straight run from where she is now—through success at school, to university and perhaps a life as an intellectual. But for Stella things won’t work out so simply; accidents will intervene. For a while, she will hate books, just because they had such power over her once. She will blame the books she read, because they didn’t prepare her for her life. Also, her restless intelligence will make her discontented. “He’s too simple for me,” she’ll think, even when she’s with a good man. (I wrote that bit just yesterday.) On the other hand, you can’t un-wish intelligence—no one ever wishes they couldn’t understand what they can. And, of course, Stella’s intelligence is the power that enables her to put her story together and make sense of it.

Slang whizz Tom Dalzell tries to keep up with the incredibly noisy world of “rickrolling,” “randos,” and “iDollators.”

Esquire lists the “75 Books Every Man Should Read” (and over at Joyland, a similar list, but with books written by women).

Chester Brown talks to Mother Jones about his new comic book, “Paying For It,” which chronicles his foray into prostitution: “The weird thing about doing those drawings was having to conceal the women’s faces. That limited my ability to draw sex to some degree.”

Is the book dead? Isthebookdead.com can answer that.

Asti Hustvedt examines the lives of hysterics in a nineteenth-century Parisian hospital in her new book, “Medical Muses.”

The résumé is dead: how to tell a persuasive story in your “bio.”

As libraries close down, where do all the books go?

Yes, Elvis is a popular subject: the new book “Black Velvet Art” examines the diverse cultural history of “velvet painting.”

While Oprah has given out some extravagant prizes through the years (see: everybody gets a car), we confine our awards to simple gifts for the truly worthy. Congratulations this week’s winner, Amber Li.

This week’s titles: “The Poisonwood Bible,” “The Book of Ruth,” “Middlesex,” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Amazon released its list of “Most Well-Read Cities” yesterday, which they define as the twenty cities in the U.S. with a population of over 100,000 whose inhabitants order the most books, magazines, and periodicals in print and digital editions from the site per capita. The per capita is important, because when you look at the list, you’ll see that none of the largest cities in the nation are on it:

1. Cambridge, Mass.
2. Alexandria, Va.
3. Berkeley, Calif.
4. Ann Arbor, Mich.
5. Boulder, Colo.
6. Miami, Fla.
7. Salt Lake City, Utah
8. Gainesville, Fla.
9. Seattle, Wash.
10. Arlington, Va.
11. Knoxville, Tenn.
12. Orlando, Fla.
13. Pittsburgh, Pa.
14. Washington, D.C.
15. Bellevue, Wash.
16. Columbia, S.C.
17. St. Louis, Mo.
18. Cincinnati, Oh.
19. Portland, Ore.
20. Atlanta, Ga. If you live in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Antonio, etc., don’t let this list make you feel bad. Perhaps you have greater access to bookstores than people in other cities; perhaps when you shop online you prefer Alibris or barnesandnoble.com. Perhaps you should be glad that you don’t live in an enclave where everyone is reading all the time. It creates a very tense, competitive, know-it-all environment. As Amazon says on its press release about Cambridge, “Not only do they like to read, but they like to know the facts: Cambridge, Mass.—home to the prestigious Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—also topped the list of cities that ordered the most nonfiction books.” I did not go to Harvard or M.I.T., but I have met many people who did, and they have all told similar tales of a land where you read for your life: knowing the facts and being able to drop them constantly in conversation (with commentary, no less) are prerequisites for coolness (for coolness!). From what I’ve heard, the pressure is immense. But no one ever said knowledge is happiness. They said something quite different, which is, perhaps, why Cantabrigians do it. Ditto for Alexandrians.

As for other cities on the list, my interpretive powers fail me: yes, most of them house universities, but does that really explain why Miami, Orlando, and Hotlanta made the cut? Maybe these places, which have warm climates and generally relaxed atmospheres, buy more enjoyable books—a few Sue Graftons to take to the beach, a couple barbecue cookbooks for the summer kitchen, stuff like that. Maybe not. Maybe everyone in Orlando invests in Professor Foglesong’s “Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando” (Yale University Press, 2003) before they ride Space Mountain. Or maybe, as the photo above, which was taken in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, suggests, they are very concerned with children’s literacy.

That brings me to a more serious reflection: Amazon’s list undoubtedly reflects the wealth of some of these cities, though not all (Orlando, for instance, ranks relatively low on the wealth index). It would be very interesting to see Amazon’s hard numbers and to see the data on what types of books are ordered by particular cities (by types I mean genre, edition—used or new—and format—print or digital), information that could prove very useful for literacy activists, people who advocate for libraries and initiatives like First Book (which Elizabeth blogged about last week). Amazon has recently begun partnering with libraries to allow e-lending on the Kindle: wouldn’t it be nice if they expanded the partnership to include information-sharing, so that libraries might serve the populations Amazon cannot?

(“Reading in the Childrens Garden at the Atlanta Botanical Garden,” by UGArdener.)

It is always a treat to see writers, an often disheveled group, dolled up in their various approximations of black-tie. The literary set looked appropriately festive Monday night in the dim light of the swank Edison Ballroom, where members of the Authors Guild gathered to celebrate Terry Gross, that remarkably disarming radio host who has interviewed, in her deft and yet unassuming way, authors of every possible stripe.

John Lithgow, immaculate in his tux, was the emcee for the evening, and he spoke eloquently about the differences between writing one’s own words and performing those written by somebody else—somebody like, say, Newt Gingrich’s spokesman. (If you missed Lithgow’s recent dramatic reading of Gingrich’s statement on “The Colbert Report,” you should hurry and watch the clip now.) After confessing that acting comes more easily to him than writing, Lithgow then bravely read from the forthcoming “Drama: An Actor’s Education,” his first book for adults.

With a radio personality as the honoree, the room was filled with people known, like Lithgow, not just for their words, but also for their voices. Garrison Keillor held forth at a table at the front of the room, and David Rakoff, his voice instantly recognizable from “This American Life,” gave a lovely tribute to Terry Gross. He noted that, although Gross has an uncanny ability to coax from her interview subjects their innermost thoughts and feelings, she rarely meets them face-to-face; the “Fresh Air” interviews are conducted with Gross in Philadelphia, and the guest in another studio, often in a distant city. (One shudders to think about what an esteemed author might wear on such an occasion. Not black tie, I’m guessing.) Tellingly, Rakoff, who has appeared on the show twice, said that he remembers both interviews having taken place in person, though in fact neither did.

After a brief montage of clips from Gross’s most notable “Fresh Air” interviews since 1975—from Philip Roth to Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen and on and on—it suddenly seemed difficult to think of a well known author who hadn’t once squirmed in response to Gross’s penetrating questions. (Had I been thinking, I’d have polled the crowd.)

And then Gross, trim and neat in a pink jacket with polka-dot cuffs, finally took the stage. She started with a joke about the rapture—“I didn’t expect to be here!”—and went on to talk about her job, not just as an interviewer, but as a reader of a great many books. When she reads on vacation, she said, she hopes the book will go on forever; when she’s reading the night before an interview, it feels as though the book will never end. (“Write shorter books!” she begged.) As she spoke, I realized that reading—I mean really reading—is what sets Gross, with her little round glasses, apart from other interviewers. What can you glean from a writer’s eyes that you can’t find in her prose? Give everything you’ve written to someone who reads the way Gross does, and you find that you have very few secrets left.

At the end of the night—as I teetered out onto the street clutching my party favor, a collection of “Fresh Air” interviews on C.D.—I kept thinking about something David Rakoff said. “I started to say that Terry Gross’s impact is incalculable,” he began, “before I realized that I mean just the opposite. You can go to a book’s page on Amazon and clearly see the difference in sales between before ‘Fresh Air’ and after ‘Fresh Air.’”

I’m sure that he is right. Who hasn’t at one point or another listened to “Fresh Air” and then rushed to the bookstore to buy whatever was being discussed? Terry Gross encourages authors to be their fascinating, conflicted, emotional, charming, difficult, brilliant selves. And, in the process, she makes us want to buy their books. That’s a miracle! Or, at least, a very good reason for us all to raise a glass.

How robots are inventing their own language of representational sounds independent of humans.

Wikipedia is the first digital entity to petition the U.N. for world-heritage status. Will it make the cut?

The top ten myths about the brain.

Coca-Cola will release “Coca-Cola,” celebrating a hundred and twenty-five years of the drink and the brand.

What does “best-seller” really mean?

Rewriting “Ulysses” for Twitter. Get in on the action.

The etymology of “swag”: from the Norwegian “svagga” to P. Diddy, a.k.a., Swag.

“It looks like something we have no right to look at.” Why “King Lear” is a nearly impossible play, and what a Fantasy League Lear might look like.

Book apps: the next chapter of e-books?

The literary stylings of the Supreme Court Justices.

When the book was handed to me, I didn’t know where to begin. Its two hundred oversized, glossy pages were filled with beautiful but impossibly foreign illustrations, men and women from a time and place I couldn’t really pinpoint. It cast a powerful spell: everyone who came to my house noticed the bright orange cover, picked up the book, and disappeared for twenty minutes or so. “Can I borrow this?” they’d ask me without looking up. When it came time for my own disappearing act, it was the first few sentences that pulled me in:

We first came across Molla Nasreddin several years ago on a cold winter day in a second-hand bookstore near Maiden Tower in Baku. It was bibliophilia at first sight. Its size and weight, not to mention print quality and bright colour, stood out suspiciously amongst the more meek and dusty variations of Soviet brown in old man Elman’s place. We stared at Molla Nasreddin and it, like an improbable beauty, winked back at us.

The book is “Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine that Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” and its subject is the aforementioned Molla Nasreddin, a “satirical Azeri periodical” published in the first three decades of the last century in Azerbaijan and “read across the Muslim world from Morocco to Iran.” Nasreddin is a traditional character dating back to the Middle Ages in Central Asia, and he served as the magazine’s unifying figure. The book, which gathers some of the best images and guides the reader through their cultural nuances, is a project of the international artists’ collective Slavs and Tatars, who describe themselves as “a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians, and Central Asians.”

Molla Nasreddin was revolutionary in many ways. In an era and a region where free speech wasn’t particularly encouraged, its authors boldly satirized politics, religion, colonialism, Westernization, and modernization, education (or lack thereof), and the oppression of women (Azerbaijan was surprisingly progressive on women’s issues at the time, granting women the right to vote in 1919—a year before the United States). And with the majority of the population at the time illiterate, the magazine was a careful and clever blend of illustrations and text. And the text itself might be the most interesting of all: it was written in Azeri Turkish, rather than Russian, the language of their colonizers. The book’s editors had the unenviable task of sorting out the text: the Azeri alphabet, written with Arabic characters for nearly a millennium, was Latinized by Lenin in 1928, Cyrillicized by Stalin a decade later, and returned to Latin following the fall of the Soviet Union.

Slavs and Tatars will be touring the world with the book and accompanying art installations for the rest of the year: Vienna now, Art Basel, in Switzerland, in June, Munich in August, Brazil in September, Minsk in October, and Stuttgart in 2012. You can look at a few sample images from the book below.

• Accompanying the first image: “A son is born.” The second: “A daughter is born.”
• “Listen, people who get a contemporary education want us to forget our old, pagan beliefs,” the caption reads. “Do not allow this to happen under any circumstances!”
• “Eastern European and Asian deputies who don’t know this is a trap,” reads the caption. “The trap is labelled ‘the game in Eastern Europe and Asia.’”
• “Son, hit your mom and I will admire you.”
• “While the Russians, Ottomans and Serbians lounge in the background,” the editors write, “Austria tries to capture Albania but make it seem as if it fell on its own.” The caption reads: “Austria: ‘We need to be very careful shaking the tree so that the apple falls itself.’”
• “A strongman stands in front of the oil workers and boasts: ‘No one is able to beat me and yet, no one hires me.’ The boss answers, in Russian, ‘It doesn’t matter, there isn’t any work anyhow.’”
• “A member of the Young Turks leads old clerks and members of the Ottoman Empire’s security apparatus away by a leash.” “Enough!” he tells them. “You’ve ruled us for 32 years.”
• “It doesn’t hurt to always bear arms…as it is necessary for both praying and for fighting.” The editors note slyly: “Yet another position upon which fundamentalist Muslims and Evangelical Christians could get together and share best practices.”
• The captions for the left and right pages, respectively, are “According to the book, the world of the devil,” and “According to the book, the world of believers.” “With the bicycles, cars, bridges and buildings, the world of the devil is modern and developed,” the editors write. “The world of believers is full of ethereal illusions and idleness.”
• “Listen, son, go buy a copy of Molla Nasreddin but don’t tell anyone.” “In a show of bravado,” the editors write, “the illustration demonstrates that despite the religious establishment’s disapproval of Molla Nasreddin, the clerics still read it, if secretly.”
• “A biting critique of the role of clerics in the newly formed Iranian Majles (Parliament): the ‘Sina’ (literally: chest) refers to the self-flagellation of the Shi’ite Ashura-Tasua ceremonies.”
• “For reasons beyond our control, this page is empty.”

New York City is often full of pleasant surprises: the team of concerned bystanders rallying to help a lost child, the spontaneous dance parties at moments of national import, the everyday pleasantries and coincidences that fill the Metropolitan Diary. But last night, the city disappointed. What was everyone doing that kept them from Emma Donoghue’s reading at the PowerHouse Arena in Dumbo, on the occasion of the paperback release of “Room”? Granted it was the first delightful spring evening in weeks, but this is Emma Donoghue, a haunting writer, charming speaker, and fascinating thinker (as she displayed in a live chat on this site earlier this year), in an intimate setting—with free wine!—and only about two dozen people showed up? A shame.

Emma was not deterred. She read with high energy, her raised eyebrows and wide eyes channeling Jack with far more accuracy than one might expect from a forty-something woman, even the one who created him. When she finished reading the scene in which Ma finds out that Old Nick has been laid off, with Jack listening through the wardrobe slats, Donoghue spoke about writing that scene (“An author always keeps her characters in a locked room; even if you give them continents to play on, you’re still in control”) and the peculiarity of her biography (in translations of “Room,” of which there have been nearly forty, it often says she lives with “her man” and two children, rather than with her “partner”), then asked if there were any questions. “Don’t worry if not,” she said, grinning. “I can supply my own.” And surely she would have, had we not pounced.

It is a mistake to hold a notebook in your hand while Donoghue speaks, for your desire to capture each sentence that flows from her mouth so vivaciously and perfectly formed may interfere with your enjoyment of the event. But I did allow myself to write down one line that I thought might be of interest to Susan Orlean, who asked earlier this week when “Mom” became a dirty word. Donoghue described Ma’s attentiveness to Jack—a level of focus and patience that most five-year-olds would dream of. But Donoghue thought it important that she not come off as saintly or too good to be true. “She has devoted herself to motherhood because she doesn’t want to define herself as a sex slave, and the only other option is ‘Jack’s mother,’” she explained.

Sometimes “Mom” isn’t all that dirty, given the alternatives.

Twitter was abuzz with chatter about Mindy Kaling yesterday. She had attended a breakfast at Book Expo America and said funny things like “This is like a high school reunion where all the jocks were killed in a plane crash … & all the minorities too” and “In TV I work in rooms full of white men. It’s interesting to see where all the women went,” both of which were tweeted by Publishers Weekly. The rest of the Twitter love came from fans who’d read the twenty-six-page-excerpt from Kaling’s forthcoming book “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” (the thing that brought her to the expo), which her publisher had just posted online for free. Kaling, who writes and produces for “The Office” (and plays Kelly Kapoor), really, really strikes a chord with the demographic she’s writing for, which is the demographic just below Tina Fey’s (i.e., unmarried, babyless women above the age of sixteen and under the age of thirty). “Oh my God, @mindykaling’s new book is everything I need in my life. I feel like I wrote this (or at least thought it),” one tweeted. And another: “It’s uncanny how @mindykaling has intercepted the collective brain of my friends and me.” Kaling’s book, which is a collection of humorous essays and advice on fashion, dating, and how to be a good best friend, sounds a lot like it was written by a smarter version of Kelly Kapoor, everyone’s favorite girly girl, which helps to explain the appeal: if you love Kelly and think the three minutes or so allotted her on episodes of “The Office” are too few, you can take home Mindy, spend a few hours with her, and keep her on the shelf.

Funny women actor/writers—Tina, Mindy, Kristen, and Amy (first names only please)—are having a real cultural moment. If you keep an eye out for such things, you’ll have noticed that these women are funniest when they’re writing themselves, perhaps because they are usually playing a version of themselves: Liz Lemon is best when Tina Fey writes her; Kristen Wiig broke out of her twitchy “S.N.L.” persona in “Bridesmaids”; Amy Poehler’s character Leslie Knope shone in the couple episodes of “Parks and Recreation” Poehler wrote; and Kelly Kapoor is funniest when Mindy Kaling’s in control. This makes sense: can you imagine anyone besides Woody Allen writing the Woody Allen character? It could be done, but there would be brand disintegration. Allen has so protected his persona that it has long been identifiable, cohesive, and fungible, meaning others can easily slip it on (most recently Owen Wilson in “Midnight in Paris”), and it would be nice for some of these women writer/actors to be able to do something similar over the course of their careers.

Something strange happens to me when such professional funny people turn to writing prose: they’re often wonderful writers (you can read some great Allen and Fey in The New Yorker), but I have trouble focussing—I can hear their voices reading the words aloud with the correct cadence, rather than the one my brain imposes; I can see their faces making the expressions only they can make. It’s very distracting. And so, even though I like their books, I don’t really want to sit and read them all by myself. I want Tina Fey and Woody Allen to come over to my house and perform their books in my living room.

With Kaling’s book, the problem is amplified by the disjointed structure: it’s a collection of bits begging to be performed on a stand-up stage. And they need Kaling’s bobbleheaded-deadpan delivery to make them pop. In a chapter called “The Day I Stopped Eating Cupcakes,” she writes about an offer made to her by a cupcake salesman: “We know you’re on Twitter. (Leaning in conspiratorially) and, if you’re willing to tweet about loving Sunshine Cupcakes, this cupcake (gesturing to the one I was buying) is free”:

I did not know it was possible to be triple offended. First of all, Manager Woman, if you notice that a thirty-one-year-old woman is coming to your cupcake bakery every day for a week, keep that information to yourself. I don’t need to be reminded of how poor my food choices are on a regular basis. Secondly, how cheap and/or poor do you think I am? A cupcake costs two bucks! You think I’m miserly enough to think, like, “Oh goody, I can save those two bucks for some other tiny purchase later today”? And thirdly, even if I were to buy in to this weird bribey situation where I endorse your product, you think the cost of it would be one measly cupcake? The implications of this offer were far worse than anything she meant to propose, obviously, but I hate her forever nonetheless. This is why I never eat cupcakes anymore. The connotations are too disturbing to me. O.K., it’s funny. But I still have a request for anyone named above planning on writing a book in the future: could you please release a companion DVD of you acting out your work along with the print edition (and/or come over to my house and do it in person)? As great as books are, sometimes you are your own best medium.

(Via Shelf Life)

Thomas Foster discusses how he chose the “Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America.”

See the commemorative books exchanged by President Obama and the Queen.

Edwidge Danticat describes her relationship with Oprah in a farewell letter.

The buzz from Book Expo America.

James Dempsey discovers a lost E. E. Cummings poem.

How to launch the new James Bond novel? With abseiling Royal Marines, of course.

Katie Roiphe explores the complicated phrase “love child.”

Check out the first annual Indie Booksellers Choice Awards winners.

A few words in the right key. The edge of a great table. A nice durable cardboard. The Seventh Infantry. The shore along the Sound. A hell of a good guy. The boom of a bass drum. A hell of a long time. A damned fine fiesta.

You may have heard those lines this weekend at “Shuffle,” a performance at the New York Public Library that paired Elevator Repair Service, of “Gatz” fame, with Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, of Moveable Type (a.k.a. the cool display in the lobby of the New York Times building) fame—as exciting a collaboration for techy literary theatre geeks as the Traveling Wilburys were for cool dads. The basic gist of the show, performed in twenty-minute increments, is that the actors read from a script that is generated by interconnected software algorithms that draw on lines from the three books that E.R.S. has performed (either in adapted form or in full)—“The Great Gatsby,” “The Sun Also Rises,” and “The Sound and the Fury”—and delivered, in synch, to iPod touches tucked into paperback books with covers collaged from the three source works. It looked like this:

It would be tempting to say that the lines are pulled at random. But that’s not right at all. Hansen and Rubin’s method of arranging text is highly calculated and stylized. Their first project, Listening Post, drew from a database of chat-room conversations, bulletin boards, and other online public forums, and presented the words on a wall of small screens in a series of logical groupings. In the video below, for instance, all of the phrases begin with “I am.”

For this weekend’s performance, which was directed by E.R.S.’s John Collins, whom Rebecca Mead wrote about in the magazine, and commissioned by the library and FuturePerfect, the script looked something like this. (Sections of it were projected onto the walls, and audience members, who were encouraged to move around freely, could catch glimpses of it whirring by on the actors’ iPods.) The cavernous library room was divided into locations numbered zero through eight, and the script dictated when the actors should move where. In Location 4, they spoke from behind a library check-out counter, occasionally with champagne flutes in hand. In Location 0, they mingled with the audience.

Sometimes the program generated two-person chants that “we referred to as ‘little dead girls,’” Collins said, because the rhythm reminded them of “something out of ‘The Shining.’” For those bits, the actors would link arms and march, creepily, throughout the audience. Other times, the program would pull a series of lines that all began “he is” or “he was,” which the actors were encouraged to address to specific audience members. Vin Knight, one of the performers, had a monologue on Saturday of two hundred such sentences, which he delivered standing between two baby strollers, each holding a boy of about ten months. “He sat there between these two kids, going back and forth describing one kid to another kid,” Collins described. “He was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty,” he might tell one. “He’s a bootlegger.”

The overall effect was, understandably, chaotic. People spoke over each other, muddled lines, looked frazzled—in short, performed like actors who were reading their lines and stage directions from a small scrolling screen for the first time. Once or twice while I was there, the room went silent, save an echo from the adjoining reading room. Audience members looked at each other uncomfortably. Should we relocate to the source of the sounds, or hang here until everyone started up again? On both sides of the fourth wall was a nagging awkwardness.

But what the performance lacked in polish it made up for in concept. The idea is just so cool, and made even cooler with insight into how it developed. When Hansen and Rubin first teamed up with E.R.S., they tried pulling a script from the same database they had used for Listening Post. It didn’t go well. “I thought that would be the end of it,” Rubin said. “It seemed frustrating for the actors, and was so far from having any sort of coherence or sense. It just felt too much like a big cut-up and not enough like a piece of theatre.”

It was Collins’ neighbor, Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of P.S. 122, who had the idea to swap out the chat-room material (which “tends toward the slangy and sometimes the sexual,” Collins said) for fine literature. “Ganter said, ‘Hey, you know what you should do? You should use those novels you’ve been working on,’ ” Collins recalled. Scrambling up lines from the three books seemed a logical step; the actors already made a game of doing that at rehearsals. Having worked so closely with the texts, Collins said, the E.R.S. ensemble resembles “something out of an insane asylum; these people who all have the same affliction: they can’t stop repeating the lines from these books.” Hansen and Rubin’s algorithms would let the actors “play out this insane recombining and reinventing of these novels” that they already did, less systematically, for fun.

The three classic works seem interchangeable enough: from the twenties; white male authors; straightforward language. Collins remembers thinking “I’ll bet you won’t even be able to tell which is which.” But as Hansen and Rubin began to analyze the texts, they found significant differences. Looking at the lines from each book that had been used in the E.R.S. plays, they mapped the number and length of the sentences (below), and found that there were hardly any more sentences in “Gatsby,” which took about eight hours to read on stage, than in the other two, both of which took about a quarter of the stage time. Fitzgerald’s sentences are just that much longer. Faulkner’s proved to be particularly short and choppy, with many of the form “he said”; “she said”; “Dilsey said.” And Hemingway, of course, is heavy on the dialogue. So drawing one sentence from each book had its own natural rhythm: a long sentence of narration from Fitzgerald, a line of dialogue from Hemingway, and an attribution to a Faulknerian character.

(Click to expand.)

“Shuffle” goes on the road next month, where it will play out in a very different space: a public plaza in Prague; more Central Park than public library. Something may be lost without the bookish backdrop, high-ceilinged acoustics, and inherent sense of rule breaking (champagne in a library! iPods in books!). “We’re playing with the text in this way that’s in some ways deeply reverent, in some ways deeply irreverent,” Collins said, “and the library is a great place to play that game.”

Photograph of “Shuffle” by Wayne Ashley. Video of “Shuffle” by Davide Montecchi.

We Americans get a lot of grief for our low percentage of passport holders, but they’re not the easiest things in the world to get. Nor are they particularly easy to renew. That’s especially true on short notice—as anyone can tell you who’s happened to forget until the eleventh hour pre-trip that Canada is, well, a whole other country, or waited until the last minute to check the expiration date on their old passport. (There’s a reason why all those passport-expediting services exist.)

In the old days, passports may have been a bit easier to obtain, at least judging by the copy of Herman Melville’s 1856 U.S. passport application, a link to which popped up in my Twitter feed this morning:

Back then, it was on you to tell the authorities what you looked like. How a person could self-diagnose “Forehead: medium” or “Face: oval” eludes me (what were the other options?), but that might just be one of those things that people knew back then. Another thing they knew, judging by documents related to the Melville application available at Footnote.com, was how to cut through the red tape and go right to the top. Melville addresses William L. Marcy, then the U.S. Secretary of State. The body of the letter is brief: “I am about to visit Europe. Will you be good enough to supply me with a passport? I sail four days hence.” It seemed to work: Melville made it to Europe.

Passports can be a nuisance, but they can also be treasured symbols of citizenship and identity, as the writer Teju Cole explained in a video produced in connection with The New Yorker’s most recent Journeys Issue. Cole was born in the U.S. but moved to Nigeria as a young child. One of the lasting ties to his birth country was his American passport with a distinctive green cover; the U.S. switched to blue covers after 1976.

My first passport, issued in 1993, was green, too, since I got it during a year-long period wherein the government issued a throwback version that included a tribute to Benjamin Franklin. I’ve had one in between, but it’s almost expired. Better get a letter off to Secretary Clinton.

Via bibliokept.

This week we’ve seen retrospectives covering every possible angle of the Oprah phenomenon, in conjunction with the final episode of her show. We can’t resist joining in, with titles featuring that very special seal. Good luck!

Submit the first fully correct response via e-mail and win a copy of the brand-new anthology “The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker.” In the event of confusion, consult our official rules. We’ll announce the winner Friday afternoon.

Barnes & Noble’s new Nook is designed to be simple—so simple, in fact, that it’s “for Grandma.”

“The Book of Mormon” was a hit at the Drama Desk Awards.

Get to know the history of the rose—an object of symbolism, metaphor, and allusion.

Author Sam Lipsyte will write and produce an HBO comedy series called People City, about a “25-year-old man hired by an eccentric New York couple to be their child’s caretaker.”

Legendary book editors are retiring, but the era of great editing isn’t over.

Why don’t more men buy books written by women? Playwright and journalist Damian Barr wonders whether or not men can be good feminists, too.

If liars are storytellers and performers of their own work, does that mean that writers and artists are liars? Ian Leslie writes about why art is a lie whose secret ingredient is truth.

This week’s Briefly Noted, more briefly. (Subscribers can read the full reviews.)

“The Origins of Political Order,” by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35)
This ambitious and highly readable study draws on the disciplines of biology, anthropology, economics, and political philosophy to chart how various pre-eighteenth-century agrarian societies changed from kin-based tribal communities to societies characterized by an impersonal, merit-based bureaucracy.

“33 Revolutions per Minute,” by Dorian Lynskey (Ecco; $19.99)
The book is impressive in scope, if thin on critical insight. By ending with a consideration of John Mayer’s insipid “Waiting for the World to Change,” Lynskey makes it clear that the political protest song as we’ve known it is in rough shape.

“We Had It So Good,” by Linda Grant (Scribner; $25)
The [novel], clearly intended as a portrait of the baby-boom generation, feels more like a composite sketch. There is no plot—only the passage of time, which forces the characters through history.

“The Color of Night,” by Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage; $15)
In his acknowledgments, Bell … writes that this book is “the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it.” The litany of cruelties is indeed shocking, but the novel lacks the psychological insight required to provoke a truly visceral response.

How do you make pulling an all-nighter in the library on a Friday—the stuff of collegiate nightmares—an appealing prospect? Host an interactive scavenger hunt and set it at the New York Public Library. “Find the Future” was part of the library’s centennial celebration, and it brought together five hundred bright-eyed book lovers at 7 P.M. on Friday evening and released them, bleary-eyed, around 5 A.M. the following morning. In the hours between, artifacts were discovered, powers were unleashed, secret messages from the future were intercepted, and a book was written.

The game operated on several levels (anyone can now play a basic version by registering online). A hundred items in the library were marked as “artifacts” by QR tags (those weird square barcodes that smart phones can identify). Around seventy squads made up of seven members each scattered themselves around the library, using iPhones to find and scan the artifacts which would then “mathemagically” unlock a secret power. The powers, in turn, unlocked chapters of the epic book that the five hundred of us would collectively write by 5 A.M. Each chapter held specific assignments that correlated to artifacts unlocked by the squad. For example, one artifact was the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed bear, the “embodiment of kindness, friendship, loyalty and courage.” The corresponding assignment: “What values do think will be most important in the future? Create a new mascot and friends who could embody those values. Write their first story together, or draw your first illustration of them.” Scanners were provided for art projects.

The idea for a game began last November when Caro Llewellyn, director of the N.Y.P.L. centennial festivities, tried to imagine ways to engage young people. “The centennial is not about just talking about the past, but about looking forward to the next hundred years, too. Libraries are grappling with their futures,” she said. “Google is great, but there’s nothing like the real object. People need to come to the place to see the real thing.” A friend suggested she watch the game designer Jane McGonigal’s TED talk, and afterwards Llewellyn knew she had found the right person for her idea. McGonigal signed on immediately. “My first thought was that I’d love to do something overnight, something epic,” McGonigal said. “From there, I just brainstormed—what do you do in a library overnight? The space is awe-inspiring, it makes you think about the possibilities for your future, your dreams. This game was all about tapping into that power.”

More than five thousand people applied to play following the game’s announcement on April 1st; the five hundred players were chosen based on “ambition and creative ideas,” McGonigal said. “We looked for a diversity of skills and talents, and people who were eloquent about their hopes and dreams.”

“What was amazing is how socially aware the group is,” Llewellyn said. “They want to solve world problems: the environment, education, health care—specifically Alzheimer’s and autism. I was blown away by that. Very few people wrote flippant things.” It didn’t hurt that the applicants were mostly young, technologically savvy and, well, nerdy. “If you were doing, say, ‘World of Warcraft,’ or ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ you’d probably have seen different answers. But this is a library and we’re writing a book—you’ve got to be interested in these things to begin with,” Llewellyn said.

Collaboration was built into the game in other ways. Even before the players set foot in the library, a social experiment had begun. Through a Facebook group and the Twitter hashtag #findthefuture, some players had already started to form teams and lay out their strategies for the night. For the less tech savvy (like me), teams were formed in the old fashioned way: put on a nametag, smile a lot, and shake hands with whoever is in the vicinity. Everyone was encouraged to sign up for a tour of the N.Y.P.L. stacks, a rare opportunity. Embedded in the bookshelves were postcards from the future, addressed to each of the five hundred players, based on the ten-year goals they wrote on their applications. Each player was told to grab a postcard and find the person to whom it was addressed, thereby making a future connection.

As the night progressed, the players seized every means to find their partner, from leaving old-school post-it notes on message boards in the Rose Room, to using Twitter, or leaving posts on the group’s Facebook page. The halls of the library echoed with people calling out names and “Text me! I have your future!” Tables of players, deeply engrossed in writing our collective tome (or uploading new photos to Facebook and Twitter), would burst into fits of cheers and applause when partners found each other. The entire event felt like a Harry Potter version of a “color war” on the last night of summer camp (with a surprisingly well-stocked cafeteria). The level of detail McGonigal cultivated has already inspired others: several libraries have contacted McGonigal and the N.Y.P.L. to learn how to implement the game in their own cities.

Despite all of the advanced technology that went into building and playing the game, the final product was a physical book, printed and hand-bound over the course of the night. McGonigal said that if she knew she had a book with her name on it at the N.Y.P.L., she’d feel “totally at home” there. “I’d show people my book, it would create this bond, a permanent relationship,” she said. That kind of relationship is what she seeks to create with all of her games, what she calls a positive impact on players.

Ironically, or perhaps not, it was this old-tech part of the game that didn’t finish on time. Though our electronic world becomes nearly as fast as our dreams, letting us plow through a hundred rare artifacts, absorb their powers, and write our stories of the future, the limitations of our physical world prevented us from getting too far ahead of ourselves. Our collective book may not hold much literary water (3 A.M. musings rarely do) but it took time and effort. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that the act of creating, printing, binding, and signing this book did not happen entirely overnight, either. “It’s hard to get good visions of the future; people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it,” McGonigal said. “This is a way to get insight into this generation.” Considering the collaborations and memories forged during such a unique event, it’s clear we’re winning.

• A library guard locking the doors at 7:50 P.M.
• A Lego model of Fortitude, one of the N.Y.P.L lions, by artist Nathan Sawaya.
• Five hundred players gather in the Main Reading Room; Caro Llewellyn gets everyone’s attention from the stage.
• Jane McGonigal delivers her opening remarks.
• Posters reminding the players of deadlines.
• The game app in action.
• Scanning a QR code.
• Katherine M. activates the Winnie the Pooh artifact.
• A postcard from the future, lying in the library stacks.
• Kristin H. and Patience, one of the library lions.
• Gavin Dovey, bookbinder, at his station.
• A story checklist, and notes seeking postcard partners.
• Successful and exhausted at 5 AM: with Regina C., Thomas A., Kendra H., Kristin H., Katherine M., and Kristin S.
• Exiting the library at sunrise.

While the world awaits confirmation as to whether Vladimir Putin will challenge, or push aside, his protégé Dmitry Medvedev and run for a third presidential term, we’ve been enjoying the odd and extensive Q. & A. that Gayne C. Young, a high-school English teacher and contributor to Outdoor Life magazine, managed to get with Putin, in which the Russian leader talks about America’s history of manly Presidents (he points to Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama), environmental preservation, Christianity, and some of his favorite books:

I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors.

Later in the interview, Young follows up on the Hemingway connection, introducing some of his own favorite outdoors literature—including the hunting writers Peter Capstick, Robert Ruark, and Jim Corbett. Here Putin turns professorial, and slightly scolding:

It seems to me that we have a slightly different understanding of the outdoors concept…. I would not be wrong, I believe, if I were to say that we have rather different views even on Hemingway. It seems to me that the book you enjoy most is Green Hills of Africa. As for me, it is A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.

Putin places his sentiment with the somber and wounded among Hemingway’s protagonists—Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan, the old fisherman Santiago—though notably he leaves out Jake Barnes, the conspicuously wounded lead character in “The Sun Also Rises.” Putin rounds out his reading list by recommending two Russian titles to an American audience: Turgenev’s “A Sportsman’s Sketches” and the short stories of the nature writer Mikhail Prishvin.

Young’s surprising exclusive emerged from previous blog posts he had written for Outdoor Life, including one in which he wrote about the “man crush” he had developed for Putin. Soon Young heard from the Russian Embassy, which arranged for Young to deliver questions to Putin, who later delivered an eight-thousand-word response, much of which was cut to yield the final version. (In an odd tidbit, Ketchum, the public-relations firm that often represents Russia and helped arranged the interview, shares the name of the town in Idaho where Hemingway lived out his final years—fishing, hunting, and, finally, killing himself.)

Perhaps Putin and his handlers misunderstood the reach and scope that Outdoor Life has in the United States, but more likely the interview represents a rather shrewd p.r. move. Where else in the American press would Putin be given space to demur at such questions as “Are you the coolest man in politics?” And the venue and subject play up Putin’s particular strengths in the West, burnished by the stagey iconography of a rugged, resolute, and often shirtless outdoorsman. Putin the benevolent naturalist is a more appealing character than Putin the ruthless and endlessly ambitious politician—a man who has overseen years of civil-rights abuses and crackdowns on the press and run a government that displays an often blatant disregard for established laws. (It’s also more appealing than Putin the entertainer, based on the YouTube video that captures his mangling of “Blueberry Hill.”)

At the end of the interview Putin offers a view of life by pointing to the nineteenth-century writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and his fable about a fish who hides beneath stones, fearful of danger. The moral, per Putin: “One can truly enjoy his or her life only while experiencing it, and it is inevitably related to a certain level of risk.” Finally, then, this is the projected Putin packaged for America: the man of action, the teller of fables and myths.

Note-taking 2.0: Livescribe smart pens connect directly to Google Docs, e-mail, or your desktop.

The Brontë sisters: spiritual godmothers of science fiction.

What constitutes a flawed typeface? Paul Shaw investigates.

“America 2049” is a social-networking game that tackles human rights, through Facebook.

Great Scots! Is there a Scots language revival underway?

The moral universe of Stieg Larsson and why it is so perversely appealing.

How Oprah’s Book Club changed the publishing landscape.

Check out “The Valley of Fear,” the fourth and final volume in the series of graphic-novel adaptations of Sherlock Holmes.

How a high literacy rate helped to drive the “Arab Spring.”

Big books have never really been my thing. The sweeping epics, the Great Russian Novels by the Great Russian Writers, the thousand-page masterpieces: it’s a whole subgenre that I’ve never bothered to crack (I was worryingly going to admit that the longest book I’ve read might have Harry Potter in the title, but a search reveals that “Our Mutual Friend” clocks in at eight hundred and eighty pages—with a sensibly small font!—so I guess I am an adult after all). In college, studying the British Empire and then contemporary fiction, the books were often dense but never staggeringly heavy. These days, most of my choices hover in the three-hundred-something-pages range, which makes for a nice, uniform bookshelf but doesn’t say much about me as a reader. But I live in New York City; who wants to lug a thousand pages around on the subway?

So with all this in mind, I read Mark O’Connell’s piece at The Millions last week with a kind of detached, anthropological amusement. “The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels” is a fantastic essay, chronicling O’Connell’s journey from a reading life of quality over quantity—he calls himself a “Slim Prestige Volume man”—to one in which he’s devoured by the gargantuan classics. He starts with “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and he writes:

I can’t say that I enjoyed every minute of it, or even that I enjoyed all that much of it at all, but I can say that by the time I got to the end of it I was glad to have read it. Not just glad that I had finally finished it, but that I had started it and seen it through. I felt as though I had been through something major, as though I had not merely experienced something but done something, and that the doing and the experiencing were inseparable in the way that is peculiar to the act of reading.

The big metaphor at work is the Stockholm Syndrome: these books kidnap you, hold you hostage, and make you love them, despite all their faults and your anger and frustration along the way. O’Connell makes a good case for all of this—I like thinking about the act of reading, and about the idea of a book having ownership of its reader—but, I must admit, I didn’t exactly rush out to buy a copy of “Ulysses,” either.

All this put me in mind of a letter written to the editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein, on the Review’s blog a few months back. The writer asks:

I always tell people that my favorite book is “Infinite Jest,” and even though I haven’t gotten halfway through it, it’s still the best half of a book that I have ever read! Do you have any guilt from unread books floating around?

Now this was something I was shamefully, intimately familiar with. My bookshelf is crammed with books I’ve kind of almost kind of read, and even more damning (here’s hoping my former professors don’t read this), with books assigned for classes that I only ever read half of (and proceeded to discuss and, in some sad cases, write papers about). Stein bravely lists a good few dozen books he’s read bits of and, one assumes, regularly lies (by omission, of course) about having finished—and it’s no surprise that quite a few titles from O’Connell’s long books discussion, including “Gravity’s Rainbow,” pop up there.

But that’s not what brought the two together in my mind. On one hand, we have big, painful books we feel compelled to see through to the end. On the other, the books we’ve sort of read and glibly lie about having finished. Both of these seem tied to some sort of reading scorecard, one in which the readers are measured and judged by—perhaps even more than—the books that they’ve read. If you hate a movie, you probably have no qualms about turning it off or walking out of the theatre, and the blame is placed on the film and those who made it, not on your movie-watching abilities. By the same token, no one will pat you on the back for watching something long and difficult, but they will if you’ve read "Ulysses" (and if you’ve given up halfway through, no one can blame you, though if you lie and say you finished it, I guess you’re in good company).

But is the reading scorecard internal or external? Or are the two so entwined that it’s impossible to answer that question? I used to keep a list of the books I’d read on my blog, but I took it down because I began to feel like I was keeping score (though now, unfortunately, I can barely remember what I read three months ago). In a post Jeannie wrote about virtual bookshelves a few weeks ago, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh said that the reason he eagerly and frequently posts what he’s read to his Facebook profile is purely selfish: “I hate to admit this: I don’t look to see what anybody else is reading. I just do it for myself. Maybe it harkens back to the summer I was eight years old and signed up at the public library to read x number of books. I ended up winning a transistor radio.”

Last fall, I met up with a friend in Central Park, and as we passed the field glasses back and forth he told me, with the sort of glazed-over, walking-wounded expression that O’Connell prescribes to people who’ve wrestled with a big book, that he’d just finished “A Dance to the Music of Time” and felt as if he’d “lost a limb.” When I asked him about it again recently, he said he enjoyed it, though he felt “almost as if ‘reading’ as an activity became reading that particular book. So when it came to reading something else, it felt ultra weird and unnatural.” Maybe that’s exactly the point. Good books, no matter what their length, should suck you in and change the way you read, momentarily or, in the very best cases, permanently. The thought’s enough to make me want to stop nodding along with Lorin Stein when people bring up the classics I’ve shirked. I’ll be buying a sturdier bag to schlep around a few masterpieces on my daily commute.