You know how sometimes you read reviews and it seems like the reviewer read an entirely different book than you did? [link]

He told Svensk Bokhandel magazine that he had "got worked up in advance about Britt-Marie Mattsson because I detest her so very greatly. But let's hope the book is published so I get the chance to say it for real."

Ha ha ha ha. Oh my God. That's ridiculous.

That is totally awesome. In a terrible way.

Ian McEwan finds his long lost brother.

The way to have a house built if you are a book-lover (NYTimes, needs free registration) [link]

That article needs more pictures. So taunty.

VERY taunty--there's no picture of this awesome staircase they talk about, just of the kitchen. WTF?

SyfyPortal says that HBO is going to make Song of Ice and Fire into a series.

Gothic Gold: the Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction

Fascinating story for bibliophiles, including the discovery of the actual Northanger Horrid Seven ("the gruesomely gratifying Gothics recommended to Catherine Morland by Isabella Thorpe in the pump room at Bath in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey.") which had been thought imaginary.

When Sadleir was named executor of the Hutchinson library upon Hutchinson's death in August 1927, he could only ponder "what a tremendous and in some ways macabre task had been laid upon me." Sadleir describes his first viewing of the entire Hutchinson library in a scene suggestive of a Gothic victim's helpless awe during a spectral encounter or facing a premature burial.

I shall never forget the first sight of that astonishing collection. After sending our credentials to the repository and fixing a time for a preliminary view, we asked for certain sample cases to be unpacked in readiness for the visit. Having arrived at the huge building, we were conducted to a sort of mezzanine floor--low ceilinged and in complete darkness. There were 140 packing cases of books, of which a random dozen or fifteen had been unpacked. We were given torches and left to investigate. The rays of light flickered across the vast floor on which--spines upward--were ranged row after row of books. It looked as though an over-floor of books had been laid down, with the narrowest passages here and there through which we crept, flashing our torches on title after title, and feeling every moment more appalled at the prospect of having to sort these thousands of volumes and prepare them for sale. For they were completely unclassified and desperately miscellaneous; quite half were still parcelled and would have to be undone and distributed before even a start could be made. Out in the daylight my colleague and I stared at one another in despair. What in the world were we to do?

This is cool...

It is perhaps this chapbook element of the Sadleir-Black collection which draws the researcher rather than its ponderous triple-decker Gothics with their casual slaughters, serpentine plots, and complex turnings of the screw. The collection's chapbooks clearly indicate acute shifts in the tastes and expectations of the Gothic readership. As early as the 1790s as these primitive paperbacks began to seep into the system, the Gothic novel in long form as it was being mass produced by the Minerva Press was already becoming an endangered species. Gothic readers would still tolerate such performances as Agnes Maria Bennett's Gothic behemoth in six volumes, Vicissitudes Abroad; or, The Ghost of My Father 23 published in 1806; but by eliminating all moralism and by pushing the characters along a corridor of blood and bringing them either to the altar or the grave within the alloted thirty-six pages, the chapbookers would eventually drive out such lengthy Gothics and corner the market. Their phantasmic titles coupled with the garish vigor of their illustrations offered their devoted public instantaneous horror that the long Gothics could not match. It did not matter that almost every shilling shocker was a plagiarized reduction of The Monk or one of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances or a tawdry compression of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, or Cymbeline.

What in the world were we to do?

Squee madly and possibly orgasm in sheer booky delight?

Oh, just me, then?