Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is the silliest and most anticlimactic book I’ve read this year, with plodding prose, thin characters, meaningless deaths, and clunky exposition. It is perhaps King’s worst book since The Tommyknockers. However, as a Kaufmanesque stunt intended to piss off loyal fanboys, in this regard, it’s icily effective. The question, however, is whether such a ploy needed to kill so many trees and drain so many simpering saps’ wallets.

It’s the fifth inning. Boston is 4-0 as I write these words. Mark my words: the Sox will make it. And if the Sox make it into the Series, then I have a strange feeling that Kerry will take the White House with ease. It’s only a working theory and I have nothing sizable to go on other than the Massachusetts connection. But for the love of baseball and for the love of the nation, suffuse all your good juju into the Sox, baby. Let’s take this nation back. Preternaturally. This will be Mass’s year.

According to the Man Booker folks, the winner was announced 10:00 PM British Time. That was thirty minutes ago. Since no announcement has been forthcoming, I called Colman Getty PR. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty has won.

[UPDATE: The press release is now up.]

• Understatement of the week: Joyce Carol Oates, “The process of writing is something that I live with everyday.”
• Yardley on J.D. Salinger
• The Plot Against America — failed Saturday Night Live skit?
• Independent publisher Cannongate is rolling in the dough, thanks in part to such titles as The Life of Pi and The Crimson Petal and the White.
• Tonight, the Booker Prize winner will be announced. Longshot (and the only woman nominated) Sarah Hall talks with the Guardian.
• Where’s Grambo on this one? Angelina Jolie loves sleeping with British men.