Smatterings

After the past week, which included:

A family reunion
Eating enough kosher chinese food to remind myself why I don’t like to eat chinese food of any sort
Attending a birthday party in the form of a murder mystery based off of Jed Rubenfeld’s THE INTERPRETATION OF MURDER (where I was not allowed to play a major role lest I spoil the book, being one of three people who had read it and the other two organized the shindig)
Looking over the spring 2008 St. Martin’s Minotaur catalog and realizing I’ve already read a disturbingly high number of frontlist
My cable connection crapping out until further notice (thank you, Time Warner, for being your oh-so-hospitable selves)
Getting (finally, I hope) back into the swing of things with weekly choir practice

It’s nice to have some regular scheduling again. Ergo, links:

Steve Erickson talks to the LA Times’ Scott Timberg about his hard-to-categorize fiction, the latest of which is ZEROVILLE.

The New York Daily News’s David Hinckley isn’t such a big fan of the new season of Court TV’s Murder By the Book.

Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of the Year includes crime novels by Laura Lippman, Matt Beynon Rees, Thomas Cook, James Lee Burke, Karin Slaughter and Charles Ardai, to name a few.

Steven Kellman has a very pointed slant on the fact/fiction blurring that may or may not take place in Philip Roth’s EXIT GHOST. (via)

I keep forgetting to link to Mike Ripley’s highly entertaining columns for SHOTS but won’t make that same mistake for the November edition.

Is the hardback literary novel dead in the UK? Picador’s new move to a simultaneous hardback/paperback format does sound a bit of a death knell…

The IMPAC shortlist is out and once again, with 137 titles on the list, it’s a veritable monster.

And finally, I suspect Patrick Kent is not making a lot of fans within Baltimore’s police and forensic science ranks.