This and That, Here and There

Today is a bastard of a day. Wednesday’s nearly always are. Thankfully, there are links to distract us:

Am I the only one who doesn’t follow any famous people on Twitter? Now, if Shaquile O’Neal talked about bookselling and book covers all day long, then maybe he’d be worth a follow. Anwyay, here’s the LA Times list of 25 Must Follows. Harper Studio has one that’s more in line with my sensibilities.

The Skylight blog is blowing up in a big way lately, with a sexy new design, some great content-y posts, and, um, a display about Chuck Taylors. What’s not to love?

I have a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what The Rumpus is (apparently it’s “the literary equivalent of stolen wi-fi.” Oh, okay) , but I love this essay by Adam Kaufman about 2666 and “The Wire” (Shocking, I know): “To put it simply, Juárez is an example of Mexico’s rise to a place from where Baltimore and many other formerly great American cities have fallen. The normal citizens who move up within this new North American power spectrum are in as great of a danger as those who fall to the bottom.“They were convinced the city was growing by the second. On the far edge of Santa Teresa, they saw flocks of black vultures…Where there were vultures, they noted, there were no other birds.” (129) “They don’t fly away because their wings are clipped.” (Season 2, Episode 8 )” In other news, 2666 was knocked out of the Tournament of Books today. We’ll see if it returns in Zombie round action.

The Millions has followed up its Islands in the Stream post about indie bookstores in NYC with a walking tour of independent bookstores. The tour is scheduled for May 2 at 11 a.m. Click through for complete details.

By now you may have heard about the contentious panel on the future of publishing at SXSWi (The i stands for interactive). Here is an excellent post recapping what happened by Peter Miller, a publicity director at Penguin and owner of Freebird Bookstore in Brooklyn (It’s on the walking tour, for those interested). Be sure to read the comments to get a well-rounded look at the panel. Of special note are the excellent comments from Kassia Kroszier and Richard Nash. Read the Twitter feed about it, too (#sxswbp).

And finally, since it’s probably off most of your radars by now, I’ll point out that the novelist Helen DeWitt (The Last Samurai) has left an insightful comment on my post I Read an E-Book (And I Liked It). Click through to the comments and check out what she has to say. I echo pretty much all of those sentiments.