Has the age of the personalized newspaper suddenly arrived? The cover of my copy of today's New York Times Book Review asks "Why Are Jews Liberals?", and as a Jewish liberal I'm really not used to being singled out like this. I'll have to call a Christian conservative friend and see if he got a custom version too.

1. How delightful to learn that James Joyce may have invented the word 'blog' during a typical conversational ramble in Finnegans Wake! Here it is in context:

There’s a certain kind of author whose cool sneaks up on one so quietly, hastily, and tardily that the only legitimate response for the (otherwise) well-read savant may be to reject this problematic writer, now the ne plus ultra of the literary set, out of hand.

In close proximity to primordial Florida swamps, branch-shrouded canopy roads, and Kafkaesque state capital intrigues, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer are Tallahassee’s greatest unnatural resource.

Ann is the fiction editor of Weird Tales Magazine, its continuing mission to publish brilliantly strange original material unavailable anywhere else. Jeff is on the cutting edge of the “New Weird,” infusing literary proficiency back into gothic fantasy and sci-fi with such novels as Veniss Underground, City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek, and most recently, Finch.

I first discovered Beowulf when I was around ten years old. On rainy weekends, when my brother and I started to wreak too much havoc inside the house, my father would round us up and read us poetry. I’m not sure if he felt that poetry would have a calming effect on us, or if he was just trying to instill some culture, but poetry was his weapon of choice. He had gone to the University of Illinois on the GI Bill, and had studied English Literature. It wasn’t a very practical choice from a career perspective, but he did get some good books out of it.

Let me begin this review by saying that if there were awards for being an ADD poster child, then I'm sure I'd have a shelf covered with trophies. Concentrating on a single task for longer than two minutes is something I just don't do, so reading an entire novel in a single day in (mostly) one sitting isn't something that happens very often in the life of Jamelah. Yet that's exactly what I did yesterday with Neil Gaiman's latest, Anansi Boys, and here's why.

Anansi Boys is a follow-up to the incredibly popular American Gods, which I have never read, although it gets recommended to me at least once every six months. It tells the story of Charles Nancy, a.k.a. Fat Charlie, whose incredibly embarrassing father dies one night while singing karaoke. Fat Charlie's life goes into a tailspin, much of which is brought on by the discovery of his long-lost brother, Spider. Along the way, there are all sorts of hijinks -- with love, with work, with the law -- four endearingly perfect little old ladies and healthy doses of magic, folklore, mystery and humor. And a lime. Can't forget the lime.