As if I needed more prodding to write about David Shields' Reality Hunger, the book appears in today's New York Times Book Review, respectfully reviewed by Luc Sante, who urges (I nod approvingly here) a calm and sympathetic reading of the controversial work:

On the whole, though, he is a benevolent and broad-minded revolutionary, urging a hundred flowers to bloom, toppling only the outmoded and corrupt institutions. His book may not presage sweeping changes in the immediate future, but it probably heralds what will be the dominant modes in years and decades to come. The essay will come into its own and cease being viewed as the stepchild of literature. Some version of the novel will endure as long as gossip and daydreaming do, but maybe it will become more aerated and less controlling. There will be a lot more creative use of uncertainty, of cognitive dissonance, of messiness and self- consciousness and high-spirited looting. And reality will be ever more necessary and harder to come by.

1. Thank you to my generous readers for allowing me to workshop my memoir on this site during the full course of this year. I quietly announced this project last December, and when I look back at my initial announcement I see how much my concept has evolved since then. For one thing, I originally conceived it as a 15-year memoir (1993 to 2008), but at about the halfway point I realized that the story would have a perfect arc if I ended it at 2003.

Some of my literary/blogger friends have taken to tweeting their literary links. Not me -- I'm holding out for the blog format, just like McSweeney's is holding out for newspapers. Here's another roundup involving great writers and other finds ...

1. Nature magazine goes way back.

1. A creepy publicity stunt involving flies carrying little paper advertisements at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Doesn't this make you feel bad for the flies?

International literature gets a decent workout in today's New York Times Book Review. I'm about to dive into The Book of Fathers, a 300-year family novel by Hungarian favorite Miklos Vamos, and I'm encouraged to hear that Jane Smiley thinks well of it.

1. I'm glad to hear the New York Times will probably not put its core news content behind a payment wall after all. Instead, they're test-marketing some extraneous "gold" and "silver" plans that I hope New York Times loyalists will pay up for, though the author of the article linked above is skeptical that such loyalists exist.

1. For your Bloomsday enjoyment: comic strip artist Robert Berry is visualizing James Joyce's Ulysses. This project appears to be off to a great start.

2. More Bloomsday action: Dovegreyreader on a new book called Ulysses and Us by Declan Kibberd.