Also worthy of your attention this afternoon is Mark Sarvas’s guidelines for first-time novelists.  Among his excellent advice:  justify your own existence.  “About a year ago, in a P&W interview, an editor – I can’t recall who – said when she reads a book, she always asks why did this need to be written?  (The implication, by extension, is why it should be published and/or read.) Andrew Sean Greer approvingly quotes Toni Morrison about writing to fill a space on the shelf that is presently empty.”

Definitely check out the newest Tumblr blog to sweep the nation:  F**k Yeah NYRB Classics! If features the always gorgeous NYRB Classics covers with thoughtful write-ups from the blog’s author.

And lastly, buried as a joke near the end of his most reason “Mailbag” column, one of Bill Simmons’s fans has a kind of brilliant insight:  “Q: Did Josh Baskin invent the Kindle in his final presentation to the MacMillan toy executives? I’m pretty sure he did. Could be wrong, though. I have been wrong before.  –Todd A., Silver Spring, Md.” For those who don’t remember the scene, he’s talking about Tom Hanks’s character in Big.  In that scene, Baskin hypothesizes an electronic reader for comic books, and many of the advantages he suggests for it could be taken straight from a Bezos press release.

I’ve decided, in the spirit of the new year, with this new weather and what not, to try to shake up my reading life.  I’m going to attempt to read more than one book at a time.  If you click over to The Stack, you can see that I’m currently involved with three different books (each of them, weirdly enough, non-fiction).  I’ve never been able to successfully do this.  One book always comes to dominate my attention and I finish it before moving on to the other books.  Here’s my current plan is to read Ken Auletta’s Googled on the train and at work, Nick Flynn’s The Ticking is the Bomb when I’m home or out at a coffee shop, and Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking in pieces, here and there (Okay, actually only when I’m in the bathroom…happy now?).

The question is, can this be sustained?  Will I be able to put down one book for another?  Does anyone have tips for how to do this?  Will it make me read more books or simply indulge my desire to always be starting a new book (the “grass is always greener” phenomenon)?  I shall report back.