Recommended.

A blog post by Charles Stross, author of Glasshouse, explains why the future of electronic books looks no brighter than the present.

The New York Times has an article on new books that deal with rampant corporate crime.

In a Salon interview Jonathan Lethem, author of You Don’t Love Me Yet, wails against copyright law and celebrates appropriation.

In his review for Slate of Ben Wilson’s The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain: 1789-1837, Michael Chase-Levenson asks: Why are we still so obsessed with the Victorians?

In the London Review of Books Jenny Diski covers the Susan Sontag collection At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, which was put together by Sontag’s son.

If the funny is hard to find in Sontag’s writing, her seriousness is never in doubt, and it is precisely the suspicion of that quality that seems to distinguish the present time.

Highly recommended.

Scott Simon of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition interviews Ruth Downie, author of Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire.

The Guardian has the list of nominees for the Orange prize.

China Daily has the latest figures for book piracy in China.

The New York Times profiles Lionel Shriver, author of The Post-Birthday World.

The Washington Post has a review by Michael Collins of Andrew Wilson’s The Lying Tongue.

Salon has an article by Tom Lutz on authors who want readers to stop reading in the academic mode.

Francine Prose, for instance. In her latest book, “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them,” Prose rails against the FemiMarxiDecons in English departments that are destroying literature and everything holy.

Recommended with reservations.

The message for new teachers is becoming painfully clear: please don’t teach.

Slate has an article on John Banville’s (writing as Benjamin Black but disclosing that fact on the jacket) Christine Falls.

But what is the point of taking on a pseudonym only to identify it as such immediately? And what are we to make of the simplistic art/craft distinction he has used to defend this noir effort? One suspects that Banville, like the archly unreliable poet-madmen who have narrated his previous novels for almost 20 years, is playing games with us.

Yes, one does suspect.

National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition has readings from Margaret Bradham Thornton’s Notebooks, a collection of the journals of Tennessee Williams.

Recommended.

Christopher Byrd at the Washington Post reviews Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.

The New York Times has the winners of the National Book Critics Circle awards. The NBCC blog has more information.

So, one of Wikipedia’s most respected editors is a complete fraud. I wish that I were surprised. What does surprise me somewhat is this quote:

The New Yorker editors’ note ended with a defiant comment from Jimmy Wales, a founder of Wikipedia and the dominant force behind the site’s growth. “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it,” he said of Mr. Jordan’s alter ego.

Few people have a problem with a pseudonym, Mr. Wales. A hell of a lot of people have a problem with an invented doctorate.

Jay Parini at the Guardian’s Books Blog profiles Gabriel García Márquez, who celebrated his eightieth birthday this week.

Veronique de Turenne reviews Matt Haig’s The Dead Fathers Club for National Public Radio’s Day to Day.

It has come to my attention that Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr’s indictment of the KMT administration in Taiwan in the years just after World War II, is available on the Web.

I subscribe to several periodicals. Two subscriptions I plan to allow to lapse when the time comes. Another subscription I have canceled. The content of all three publications is uneven from issue to issue but is of acceptable quality on the whole. What is not acceptable is that every week brings a few breathlessly urgent “renewal notices” or “gift subscription opportunities.” The gift subscription push has always been offensive, but renewal notices used to be acceptable because they came attached to the next to last issue and the final issue. The subscription that I canceled pushed me over the edge. I received a renewal notice and thought “Wait. Didn’t I just start this subscription?” I looked it up in my checkbook and found that I had just started the subscription. I had received a single issue. I had eleven out of twelve months to go, and I received a notice begging me not to let my subscription run out. Enough.

Utne has an article that rounds up the most recent attacks on teachers.

Fresh Air is rerunning a 2002 interview with Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Why do the French have to be so damned right about so many things? An exceptionally unappealing article on the Oxford English Dictionary appears in the Financial Times.

Slate has an obituary of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian and author of works such as The Age of Jackson.