So far, thanks to the blogosphere, I’ve read Ian Rankin thanks to a recommendation from Sarah, Kate Christensen thanks to a rec from Ron, and (soon) John Banville thanks to a rec from Mark. Now Rake gets into the game and tells us that Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ is the shit. Okay. Sold!

I’m getting really tired of these Margaret Atwood profiles that paint Atwood as an overly serious and dowdy woman, rather than concentrating upon her writing talents. The headline here may as well have read: Margaret Atwood: Humorless Bitch or Not? Well, certainly her novels can be bleak, but it hasn’t occurred to Emma Brockes that she might be asking some really moronic questions. And I have to wonder if the Guardian would have been as nasty if, say, Martin Amis was as forthright as Atwood is in this article.

A number of folks have been asked what their favorite ten novels are over at Professor Barnhardt’s. If I had to pick my own choices, today, they’d be (in no particular order and subject to change in the next five minutes):

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Nebulas are coming to Seattle over the weekend. Here’s the nominees, with several excerpts. Among the guests are Connie Willis, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and Vonda McIntyre.

Newsday checks in with Clare Boylan, who took a two-chapter manuscript authored by Charlotte Brontë and finished it. The result is the book Emma Brown. Laura Demanski compares it to The Crimson Petal and the White. The Guardian offers shaky kudos, pointing out that Boylan is missing Brontë’s “strange power of subjective representation.”