Four For Friday: Vegas Plans To Sue

bookshelf spectrum, revisited
Originally uploaded by chotda

I have now survived more than a week of NaBloPoMo, and it's been both easier and harder than I expected. Easier, because I approach the world in a particular way knowing I need something to write about; harder, because I'm out of the habit of posting here at all, much less every single day. So here are some shorter bits I've been saving, along with an adorable pug-and-bookshelves photo I found on Flickr.

San Francisco correspondent Emily of now, tastes more like REAL life shares her last 5 books.

Kimbooktu finds a bookstore in Las Vegas. And now that she mentions it, I realize I didn't set foot in a bookstore the entire time I was there. What if you needed a book about poker? On the other hand, if you go shopping in Vegas you miss what for me was the best part--wandering through the various casinos, people-watching and seeing the ridiculous sights which have been placed there to draw traffic. We took the monorail, saw clearly plastic replicas of Egyptian artifacts at the Luxor and tried not to point at the Excalibur's sorry-looking cocktail waitresses. This was way more fun than gambling.

The Guardian lit blog suggests authors of bad books (and critics who recommend the bad books) be sued. Of course, as a critic, I disagree, because it's tantamount to suing someone for having a different opinion. Vogue might say metallics are in, but that doesn't give you the right to sue if you wrap yourself in aluminum foil and your crush starts calling you Chipotle... to take an extreme example which has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

In the war of social networking for book lovers, apparently there is one common enemy: Shelfari. Despite its eye-catching logo, the site is being criticized for spamming all your contacts without your consent when you join the site, something of which LibraryThing (which I have used in the past) and GoodReads (which I use now) both disapprove. I disapprove of it too, although I seem to remember a networking site which did the same thing and the level of outrage being similarly high. Still, if you want Amazon, your former landlady and a one-night stand to know what you're reading, you have nothing to worry about.

My weekend reads: Mark Lindquist's THE KING OF METHLEHEM and hopefully Yannick Murphy's SIGNED, MATA HARI.