Hovering over all the ruminations about literature and life that follow is the cosmic question of why so many of us feel compelled to go through life with our noses stuck in a book.

Maureen Corrigan's Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading is excerpted.

Kurt Vonnegut is going to be on the Daily Show tonight. Should be interesting.

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.

(and usually quotes the more famous lines that follow)

We went to the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival this weekend. I recommend it for those of you who live close enough to High Point that it's a feasible drive. Somehow we managed seats that were front and center and had a wonderful time.

9/11 is history--but how is it being taught to students in history courses? George Bush and other conservatives maintain that the attacks were acts of evil; liberals, while they condemn the attacks, see them as having a social and political context that we need to understand. These differences are reflected in the debate over the textbooks written in the past three years.

--Jon Wiener, "Teaching 9/11"

It's a standing joke among the president's top aides: who gets to deliver the bad news? Warm and hearty in public, Bush can be cold and snappish in private, and aides sometimes cringe before the displeasure of the president of the United States, or, as he is known in West Wing jargon, POTUS. The bad news on this early morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina had ripped through New Orleans, was that the president would have to cut short his five-week vacation by a couple of days and return to Washington. The president's chief of staff, Andrew Card; his deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin; his counselor, Dan Bartlett, and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, held a conference call to discuss the question of the president's early return and the delicate task of telling him. Hagin, it was decided, as senior aide on the ground, would do the deed.

--Evan Thomas, "How Bush Blew It"

Random Ten

Last ten songs played:

1. Mad World. Gary Jules
2. Seven Bridges Road. Dolly Parton
3. Me and the Eagle. Steve Earle
4. Ballad of Jed Clampett. Earl Scruggs and friends
5. To Love Somebody. Flying Burrito Brothers
6. Don't Strike a Match (To the Book of Love). Hal Ketchum
7. No Regrets. Emmylou Harris
8. We'll Meet Again. Johnny Cash
9. Freight Train. Marty Brown
10. Talk Like That. Kelly Willis

Doctorow is a stranger writer than he at first seems; his fiction, though generous with the conventional pleasures of dramatic plot, colorful characters, and information-rich prose, yet challenges the reader with a puckish truculence.

John Updike reviews E.L. Doctorow's The March in the New Yorker (and deems it "splendid.")

Friday morning Claudie blogging.

Remember to check out The Ark on Fridays and the Carnival of the Cats on Sundays for a round up of the best and latest pet blogging photos.