Today’s big news: Thomas Harris has turned out another Hannibal book, just in time for the holidays. I’ll keep my thoughts on Mr. Harris’s books to myself. There is something more troubling at work here.

The new book is called Hannibal Rising — this after the imaginatively titled Hannibal.

Was ever there an author more lazier with his titles? Where other authors might give you titles like Special Topics in Calamity Physics or I Feel Bad About My Neck, words that make us curious about the inner contents, Mr. Harris has decided upon Hannibal and Hannibal Rising.

Well, I don’t believe it’s too late. And, as a public service to Delacorte Press, I offer the following titular alternatives:

• Bride of Hannibal
• Revenge of Hannibal
• Hannibal Strikes Again
• Son of Hannibal
• It Came From Hannibal
• The Amazing Adventures of Hannibal & Hannibal
• Hannibal X
• Just When You Thought It Was Safe: Hannibal
• The Hannibal That Wouldn’t Die
• Hannibal: Season of the Witch
• Fishing with Hannibal
• The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Hannibal
• Hannibal, Hannibal
• The Night of the Living Hannibal
• Putting the Nib in Hannibal
• Hannibal: Dream Warriors
• Hannibal II: Electric Boogaloo
• I Ate Out With Hannibal and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
• Hannibal, How About You?
• My Dinner With Hannibal
• Hannibal’s Marauders
• Hannibal Disco Derby
• Hannibal Will Be 25 in the Year 2000
• Hannibal: Not the Cannibal You Were Expecting
• Hannibal, American Style
• The Good, The Bad & The Hannibal
• I Once Knew a Cannibal Called Hannibal
• Once, Twice, Three Times a Hannibal
• Hannibal Cordon Bleu
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hannibal
• Hannibal, Too
• I Have No Hannibal and I Must Eat
• Hannibal: The Early Years
• Hannibal on Handball
• Hannibal If You Love Jesus
• Hannibal Takes Manhattan

Corey Vilhauer has compiled a list of various bloggers’ favorite writers. At least one notable idiot, whose choices have long since changed, makes an appearance.

Diebold machines: about as easy to hack as a canceled restaurant reservation. (via William Gibson)

Who does this tosser Charlie Brooker think he is? Navelgazing over some pop idol that smart people have the good sense to ignore. I’ve only just read this wanker’s column and, according to the hed, this guy’s “supposing.”

That’s what he says, bold as brass. “Supposing,” As if loathing Justin Timberlake was some noble call to journalistic duty. All the problems of the world and this bitchy little punkass has the temerity to lock his crosshairs into something as substantial as the decaying graymatter inside his own microcephalic skull. I wouldn’t even bang his mom. And he actually got paid for this drivel? Good Christ. The Guardian ought to be ashamed. Why doesn’t he just get a blog?

I mean Jesus Christ, Brooker: “supposing” is a word you reserve for contemplating Schroedinger’s cat or Fermat’s Theorem. Has your feeble little monkey ass even heard of these things? Have you even read a book in the past six months? In a equitable world, your ass would be on the dole with all the other sad hacks who thought that they could make a difference polluting column inches with speculations on Suri’s legitimacy. But no, this Brooker guy thought he could get away with a snarky column filled with all manner of feeble vitriol. It reads as if it was written by a retarded teenager who was just kicked three times in the crotch by an octogenarian suffering from Alzheimer’s.

He can’t even take the piss out of Timberlake properly, quibbling over how Justin says “motherfuckers” on his recording. Good Christ. What sensitive ears this Brooker kid has! What overbearing prattle wasted away on fluff! If I meet Charlie in a pub, I’d throw him to the dogs. I’d get him soused on crappy Budweiser and demand that he recite the first stanza of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Lord knows if the wanker could get past “The curfew tolls.”

And wait, it gets worse. HE USES CAPITAL LETTERS AS IF HE IS SHOUTING! Right. Something for the illiterate MySpace crowd. Points with the kids. Because that’s what this is all about. A newspaper trying to hook its talons into a readership it scarcely understands. That Brooker is the posterboy for this flummery only serves to demonstrate that newsrooms are better staffed with marsupials randomly punching in keys.

I want Charlie Brooker’s skull on my dining room table. I want to have Charlie Brooker’s arm for dinner. I want to chop off his cock and compare it against Rasputin’s in that Russian Sex Museum. I’m sure it’s much shorter. I want to claim all sorts of crazy things because it might sell papers or boost my Technorati rating.

Charlie Brooker. Charlie Looking for a Hooker (Because He Can’t Land a Date), more like.

Gwenda gets into the track-by-track description game, albeit with only two tracks. Which blogger will be next? Mr. Sarvas, I’m looking at you and Green Day’s Dookie!

Ananova: “Claudio Pinto, 48 is making a living out of shows where he pops his eyes out, Terra Noticias Populares reports….Mr Pinto, from Belo Horizonte, said: “It is a pretty easy way to make money.” (via Warren Ellis)

…Tayari Jones points out that, contrary to current belief, there are plenty of African-American writers in Brooklyn beyond Colson Whitehead and Touré.

Bloggers meet up with Bill Clinton. And they’re all whiter than you.

There are seventeen books now arranged in two vertical piles on my floor. I must read them now. Every morning, I shift these books to my bag and my pockets, as pivotal as keys and wallet. There are books for interviews, books for review, and books I must read to remain more or less au courant. It’s a lot of information to digest. And I’ve responded to this by reading at every spare moment. Reading as I walk, reading while I’m on the subway, reading well after the rest of the city has gone to bed. Reading between phone calls. Reading before and after meeting friends for drinks. Reading even when the words whirl into a Gaussian blur or I can’t parse a sentence.

I wonder if I read too much, and why I feel compelled to have a book on me at all times. I’m not anti-social, although I like to spend long periods alone. I must have books — the way that others crave cashews or chew nails. I sometimes panic when I run out of books to read and I am in the middle of nowhere with time to kill. On long trips, I pack more books than I can possibly finish. I contemplate strange scenarios where I’m stuck in an elevator or locked in a building and there’s the small possibility that humanity will fail me. The books are trustworthy friends. And unless I get mugged by a pugilistic bibliophile, the books won’t leave me anytime soon. I wonder if this is a horrible conceit on my part or if this makes me a misanthrope. I wonder if all this is insalubrious. I wonder if this is an addiction.

When not reading on the bus, I observe my fellow commuters. A good 80% of them stare into space: some lost in happy reveries, others with wan mugs fixed on time passing them by. Clearly, I’m in a minority. It’s not that I can’t dream or think or get lost. But I prefer to do these things on my own time. I respond poorly to people interrupting me when I’m lost in a dream, but I’m very interested in people. In public, I feel that the courteous thing to do is to pay attention. I don’t like ignoring others.

This is probably why I feel comfortable getting lost in another person’s vision of the universe, or why I can shift from observing the real world to getting immersed in a book with greater ease. Do the books galvanize me into being social? Perhaps. I used to be very shy, but I’ve learned to disguise my diffidence. Information, foreign perspectives, and things I know nothing about or that I am wrong about are of great comfort. The books put my own neuroses into perspective when stacked against something horrible like the Tutsi massacre. This regular experiential clash grants me succor in social environments and it allows me to listen.

I wonder if this is why people always ask me for directions or seem to think that I’m the guy with all the answers. I wonder if this is why people have the tendency to open up to me. Is it the books or my temperament? Are the books a crutch? Are they holding me back? How do others get along so well without them? I simply can’t.

Books are such a strange thing to have as the center of your life. It seems strange to rely upon them so intensely. But I am, after all, a strange person. And if it hadn’t been books, it would have been something else.

Because of all this, I try to encourage any nervous kid hiding behind a book that reading is okay, that there is nothing wrong with being a book lover, and that books, in their own strange way, are often a vital and unexpected starting point for life itself.

Slate: “She says the reasons for your wife’s trouble could be many. She could have vaginismus, which causes her vaginal muscles to go into spasm and can make intercourse almost impossible. She could have had a trauma in her childhood connected to sex, ranging from abuse to being raised with a punitive attitude toward it. She could be consumed by thoughts of you with other women.”

Katie Couric is blogging. The results read like a chipmunk on methadone.

New Scientist: “A slab inscribed with the oldest writing yet discovered in the New World has been discovered in the Veracruz lowlands in Mexico.”

From 1997: Marc Demarest’s “The Responsible Preparation of Electronic Literary Texts.” This essay is a response to Sven Birkets. One wonders whether Google Print or Bartleby took any of these considerations in mind.

Daily Mail: “Britain has been branded a nation of ‘vulgar, aggressive, unprincipled, consumerist zombies’ in a scathing new book by a French academic. In a savage tirade of abuse that rips the ‘entente cordiale’ to shreds, author Agnes Poirier unleashes a savage attack on our culture, lifestyle and politics.”

I’ve known about this little operation of Mr. Wickett’s, but now that the truth is out, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dzanc Books.

Grumpy Old Bookman: “[I]f there is one person this week who has proved that she can hack it at the highest level, it is Laurell K. Hamilton.”

Diane Setterfield gets love from Frank Wilson and Kevin Holtsberry.

William Gibson: “The fear induced by terrorism mirrors the irrational psychology that makes state lotteries an utterly reliable form of stupidity tax. A huge statistical asymmetry serves as fulcrum for a spectral yet powerful lever: apprehension of the next jackpot. We’re terrorized not by the actual explosion, which statistically we’re almost never present for, but by our apprehension of the next one.” (via Powell’s Blog)

…Tayari has groupies!

My review of Haruki Murakami’s Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman appears in today’s Philly Inquirer.

Maud Newton: “My friend John was taking a leak in a public restroom once when a deranged woman appeared out of nowhere and grabbed his cock.”

I can certainly relate to Maud’s experience. My own skirmishes with weirdness are legendary, but then you might say I’m often the Pied Piper for weird people, attracting them like field mice. The hell of it is that not one small town has yet offered a commission.

There is a baby — a celebrity baby — that apparently nobody can refrain from talking about, speculating upon, offering conjecture, remarking on the photo’s authenticity (or lack thereof), gauging the baby’s patrilineage, the like.

This is all very nice. And it has all probably sold a good deal of magazines and provided a lot of water cooler conversation. If this gets you through a rough day, I can understand. If contemplating upon this baby’s provenance is what you need to prevent yourself from applying a mace to your boss’s skull, that’s okay. I’d rather see you engage in tawdry gossip over violence.

But I plan to boycott the baby. There are approximately six billion things in the universe that are more important.

I beseech you for the sake of humanity to do the same.

A 22 minute musical ode to Metafilter.

The New Republic: “After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel’s articles and blog under the username ‘sprezzatura’ were produced with Siegel’s participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel’s blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine. — Franklin Foer”

New York Times: “The RadioShack Corporation, the electronics retailer, has followed through on plans to cut about 400 jobs, but it has been put on the defensive because of its decision to notify laid-off employees by e-mail….’The work force reduction notification is currently in progress,’ the notice stated. ‘Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.'”

Cold bastards.

If ever there was an interviewer more perfectly complemented to talk with Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie about Lost Girls, it’s Susie Bright. This interview, located by those cute and cuddly folks at Spike Magazine, gets into Lost Girls‘ long-form creation, the scandalous reception, and was conducted, in part, with Melinda in a hot tub — apparently, Bright’s “favorite interview technique.”

An unfortunate event occurred at an n+1 fundraiser. The gang managed to raise $3,000, only to wake up the next morning with the loot gone. Editor Keith Gessen noted, “We’ve been much drunker than this, but the party was so nice that we were lulled into a false sense of security.” Unfortunately, there are no leads on who ran off with the cash. But hopefully, the gang will host another party, with a sober cashmaster, as well as a keymaster. (via Bookninja)