Sarah Marshall and Amelia Laing are reading their way through biographies of all the American presidents, in order. This time up, it's Thomas Jefferson. Have you heard of this fellow Thomas Jefferson? He was our third President! From 1801 to 1809! And he was the father of somewhere between five and eleven children!

Amelia: Sarah Marshall left Denver this morning #lifeisterrible. We had a grand old time, though, Sarah and I. We made literally (and I do mean literally) the best bloody mary mix ever (the secret is red hot chili flakes, real grated horseradish, and three times the amount of recommended hot sauce). We were both finishing our respective [...]

Do you live in a home without books or magazines? Or have you burned them all for heat yet? Then great news! It's likely a good chunk of the East Coast may lose power and Internet. So here are some things that you could either PRINT OUT (yes, I am serious) or of course also save to your nice, long-lasting-battery'd digital reading device.

The story of the Occupy Wall Street Archive starts with Jeremy Bold, so we might as well too. When Hollywood decides to cash in and make its OWS movie, central casting could do worse than work off a picture of Bold—he has a dark goatee and black [...]

I'm batting a full "zero out of twelve" on the Booker Prize longlist! I'm basically illiterate.

Lou Reed wore black. He moved slowly and a bit stiffly through the darkness that had descended on the Great Hall, a sheaf of paper in his hand. For the last thirty years he has looked like an ageless lizard but now I felt concern for him at the sight of his stiff gait. He entered the circle of light and put on reading glasses, gold rimmed.

Just a few minutes earlier the audience had been treated to several facts. One of them, shared by the Dean of Cooper Union, was that Abraham Lincoln had spoken in this very hall. I have been to a number of events at the [...]

It's a generally accepted rule that you shouldn't take too seriously anything an author says while promoting his book on the radio. Or at least I thought it was a generally accepted rule. Certainly, Christopher Buckley tells a great anecdote about the time he was asked by a radio host whether, per the author bio on his novel Little Green Men, he really had acted as policy advisor to William Howard Taft. Not only did Buckley happily confirm that he had advised President Taft, but he spent the remainder of the interview discussing the specific advice he'd imparted to the (very) late statesman. Of course Buckley said something ridiculous [...]

In the latest installment of what is somehow the Internet's only cooking and book chat show, Emily Gould chats with author Sigrid Nunez about her new book, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, which is brand new, out this week, so get it right now, it's short and terrific!

Cooking the Books is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier. You can see all the Cooking the Books episodes here or even subscribe via iTunes. Previously: Emma Rathbone Makes Strawberry Wafer Cookies; Doogie Horner Makes "Gettin' Laid Lemonade," Emily Gould and Tao [...]

Barbara Comyns is always being compared to writers X, Y or Z “on acid.” The acid part is a cop-out; her voice is clear and direct, even when describing surreal or hyperreal situations, and her crisp descriptions are not kaleidoscopic or druggy in the least. The comparisons to other writers, apt or not, are never a list of her formative influences; she didn’t have any.

Comyns was born in 1909 in a big house on the Avon, fourth of the six children of a drunk father and an indifferent mother. The family managed to be aristocratic and poor at once, but like many aristocrats they [...]

What a difference 27 years makes, huh? I'm referring to the gap between the 1971 film adaptation of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain and the 1998… whatever that was… of Sphere. I mean, we're mostly going to be talking about Michael Crichton's novels, but to prattle on happily for several paragraphs about Sphere without acknowledging what Barry Levinson did to it would be like not picturing a blue Billy Crudup in your head while re-reading Watchmen. We need to breathe through it, come to acceptance, and move on.

That was a shitty movie. And, to my earlier point about the gap between The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, here is [...]

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.

—[...]

"Here is a sad reflection for the ordinary reader, faced as he is with lifetimes upon lifetimes worth of books on entering even a small public library or a reasonably well-stocked bookshop. Since we can’t have very many, we must husband our time and attention carefully. But how to choose? The melancholy may lift a little when we realize that so many wise souls who have come before have been willing to serve as guides."

Here you will find a treatise on books, including The Art of Fielding, in which dudes kinda randomly go gay.

Oh perfect, Google News has announced a revolutionary new product: badges for your Google News Reading Activity. See now when you prove you are Good At Reading, your Google Teacher gives you a gold star for the day.

Actually, no gold stars: the badges range "from Bronze to Ultimate," which… that's not really a coherent scale? I think folks just think no one knows what "platinum" is anymore and why it's "better" than gold. But come on. It's not like I'm suggesting maybe rhodium should start showing up in the metal-based scale of BADGIFICATION.

Anyway, R U going to READ MOAR now that Google gives you [...]

"In college, during the time that I went to a college that had majors, I thought mine would be English, so I took a poetry class because it was required. The professor had long, long center-parted flat brown hair and was rumored to be going through a divorce. The celebrity she most closely resembled was the farm wife in the painting American Gothic crossed with an Aubrey Beardsley engraving of the Lady of Shalott. (This is how I thought about things at the time.) We read poems by women poets who were dissatisfied with their domestic lives, or by Randall Jarrell posing as one of these women…. Everything about the [...]

What did people read this year? For one, Hob Broun. Who, you ask? You should definitely find out. Perhaps you should try on some Andrey Platonov as well?

You know what? I don't want to hear you say "I've got nothing to read" for a solid two weeks at least, okay?

• And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander

• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson

• Something on a Kindle

• The Baltimore Sun (5 instances)

The forthcoming big books of 2012 include Katherine Boo, with, at last, that nonfiction book (the blurbs are wild!) and Marilynne Robinson—though with essays, not, of course, a new novel. There are a couple of other solid books on the docket, but honestly? 2012 seems a little light in the publishing loafers, compared to 2011: it looks like a line-up of serious but not particularly exciting 2nd and 4th novels and also lots of posthumous archive-wrangling. The upside of the list from this side of the year: maybe the best books of 2012 will be unexpected, all surprises and weirdo first novels and translations!

It's the FBI's super-cute reading library on Islam: "There’s Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes, who claims to have 'confirmed' that President Obama was once a practicing Muslim, and whose book asks, 'Why would terrorists oppress women if this did not have something to do with their Islamic outlook?' A book called Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology ties 'normative Islam' to 'horrendous cruelty and inhumanity.'" We're in good hands!

Yesterday Apple introduced a new version of Safari, along with a ton of other stuff, and it has something they call Reader. Some time back, we'd all heard that Apple was getting into the game, with what people were calling "Reading List," which would let you "collect webpages." This language was suspicious and largely wrong. What Reader does is pop up a nice, easy-readin' overlay over the website you're "at," allowing you to read without distraction—and also to print it or to email it to a friend. It deals with pagination really well; it looks great, and it makes sense.

Its sensible structure is, at least in part, [...]

Barnes & Noble? Forget what you've heard about sales struggles and investor confidence and whatnot: they're in it to win it. (Photo by Richard Kim.)