1. Let’s just start out with the awesome, shall we? A little tour through Vincent Price’s cookbook. “There is nothing more soul-satisfying than the first succulent bite into the juicy frankfurter,” according to dear Vince. Nothing.

2. Quick: how many poem-based films can you think of? How about The Set-Up? The Hudson Review examines this one in depth.

3. Speaking of literary films, did you know that a Scranton native’s book on Tolstoy is being turned into a film? Now you do. You’re welcome. Jay Parini’s The Last Station will star Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren, Paul Giamatti and James McAvoy. I wonder if Michael Scott will be at the premiere.

4. In even more literary film news, I just read that there’s going to be a 170-hour film version of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That collective sigh you hear is from students everywhere who hoped to catch the movie instead.

5. In praise of melancholy: “Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?”

6. Can’t make it to Europe? Why not take a literary tour?

7. Sex and the semicolon. Let’s have a vote: are semicolons girly?

8. Author Colin Cotteril writes mystery novels set in Laos, and in turn helps bring books into the country.

9. “Poll after poll confirms Austen – the modest virgin from Chawton, Hants – as our sexiest cultural product. Bonnets beats boobs every time.” Which is the lead-in to some commentary on the upcoming British TV series Lost in Austen. I had to mention it. That’s the kind of Jane Austen nerd I am.