Naked Without Books' Bybee has referred to me, more or less, as a kickass bookworm. I have never felt so honored in all my life.

May I just say: it takes one to know one.

Check her out. She's funny as all get out, reads fantastic books, and is a Johnny Cash fan.

Well, if you really want my opinion. . .

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.

I love this summation of As I Lay Dying in the Christian Science Monitor's article on Oprah's book club:

A husband and children go through fire and flood to honor a woman's last
request to be buried with her kin. Sounds touching, no? Well, the husband, who
may be the most selfish man in Mississippi and is certainly the laziest, wants
to get himself a new set of teeth. The daughter is pregnant and hoping to get an
abortion in town. The middle son is so jealous of one of his brothers that he
missed saying goodbye to his mother just to ensure that the favorite not be
there when she died. Oh, and that last request was something in the nature of
payback for 30 years of misery and backbreaking poverty. Meet the Bundrens. Or
rather, hope that you never do. "As I Lay Dying," told from 15 different points
of view, is for those who like their comedy black and completely unsweetened.
Faulkner called it a "tour de force," and it's both deftly written and mordantly
funny, but there's a relentlessly mean undertow sucking at a reader's
consciousness as well.

When all the girls my age were reading Tiger Beat and the other teeny booper magazines of the day, I was devouring Equus and Western Horseman, and plastering my walls with Arabians and appaloosas and Quarter horses instead of with David Cassidy or Bobby Sherman, or for the more discriminating among us, with Ben Murphy and Pete Duel . Which means while I was at the mercy of friends who might tire of their mini-posters of Ben and Pete and then hand them down to me, for careful saving in my green plastic pencil box, I did come across this 1971 Western Horseman photo of Pete at the San Bernardino Sheriff's Rodeo, a photo I've yet to see elsewhere on the internet.

(This posting prompted by DB, who came to visit yesterday with two large boxes full of Alias Smith and Jones and Ben and Pete memorabilia. I was in fangirl heaven, let me tell you.)

In more recent news, Bill Bryson is donating a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything to every secondary school in Great Britain.

"The government is backing the scheme, aimed at reversing the decline in interest in subjects like physics and chemistry among students." (BBC)

Would the U.S. government permit such a scheme? Probably not, considering how offensive many Americans seem to find science these days.

And, the Louvre Museum can be toured on line.

Dario: Dance on, bear

Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons. Writers, down through the centuries, had that look of being up to no good and were often mistaken for assassins, smugglers, fugitives from justice--criminals of all sorts. But the young man invading his sanctum, hands hidden in the pockets of his badly soiled green parka, could possibly be another lunatic out to kill another librarian. Up in Sacramento, two libraraians were shot dead while on duty and, down in Los Angeles, the main library was sent up in flames by an arsonist. Perera loved life and wished to participate in it further.

"You got a minute?"

"I do not."

"Can I read you something?"

"Please don't." Recalling some emergency advice as to how to dissuade a man from a violent deed--Engage him in conversation--he said, "Go ahead," regretting his permission even as he gave it. Was he to hear, as the last words he'd ever hear, a denunciation of all librarians for their heinous liberalism, a damnation for all the lies, the deceptions, the swindles, the sins preserved within the thousands of books they so zealously guarded, even with their lives?

With bafflement in his grainy voice, the fellow read from a scrap of paper.

Greet the sun, spider. Show no rancor.
Give God your thanks, O toad; that you exist.
The crab has such thorns as the rose.
In the mollusc are reminiscences of women.
Know what you are, enigmas in forms.
Leave the responsibility to the norms,
Which they in turn leave to the Almighty's care.
Chirp on, cricket, to the moonlight. Dance on, bear.

--Gina Berriault, "Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?," In the Stacks: Short Stories About Libraries and Librarians

I loved this story. Anyone familar with Berriault? Or the poet Dario?

That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant tales, and a novel called Middlemarch, as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favor of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the senuous joy of the booklover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the name had attracted him: The House of Life. He took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he had ever breathed in books, so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary of human passions. All through the night he pursued through those enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in Mr. Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church, his hour in the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability as the visions of the night.

--Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Do you have time to read this post?

Oh, if there were but world enough and time! This is the main reason to aspire to an afterlife: to sit under a celestial tree, with no library fines, and the library right at one's elbow (the library preferred to the bookstore, at least in heaven).

--Cynthia Ozick

There comes a point when every reader must confront the knowledge that there's no way they're going to read it all:

"Some people process this and adjust with ease. Some feel a dull ache occasionally but don't get hysterical. Others never recover from the knowledge, the inevitable incompleteness of their reading hanging over them like an irremissible debt." (Times Union via The Literary Saloon)

Interested in American history from an international perspective? A Barry Gwen essay discusses a dozen recent history books and the approach they take to history.

Political exile Ismail Kadare has won the first international Man Booker award, beating out the likes of John Updike, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Muriel Spark, Günther Grass, Philip Roth and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Guardian) I was happy to realize that while I was totally ignorant of Kadare my library was not. All Kadare's novels are available to me in both English and French.

And words fail me. You'll just have to see for yourself how sublime this Beatrix Potter "lost episode" of Alias Smith and Jones is. I mean, who hasn't, in the privacy of their own minds, recast Peter Duel and Ben Murphy with Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny? Especially since "The McCreedy Bust" parallels so nicely with the story of Mr. McGregor's garden. . .