Sometimes I feel lazy. Sometimes I don't have a whole blog post in me. Sometimes I just want to show you some literary links.

1. Documents newly discovered in Penzance, England (hidden perhaps by pirates?) indicate for the first time that Victor Hugo based his Hunchback of Notre Dame on a real hunchbacked sculptor hired to work on the great church's restoration. The documents describe a Monsieur Trajan, or Mon Le Bossu, as a "worthy, fatherly and amiable man" who did not like to socialize with the other restoration workers.

2. The tree that inspired Anne Frank (and many others since) during her captivity in Amsterdam has fallen down, but will live on through sapling plantings.

3. Oxford University Press wants you to adopt a word. They've got lots of unwanted words, and they'll all be put down if you don't.

1. I visited the beautiful city of Nashville, Tennessee for the first time two years ago. I can't believe how much of this great town has been damaged in last week's flood.

2. It's very weird that attempted Times Square terrorist Faisal Shahzad left a DVD of the anomie-striven movie Up In The Air to be found in his home. Novelist Walter Kirn, who we recently interviewed about the film of his book, wrote this on Twitter: "times sq. bomber leaving behind copy of 'up in the air' reminds me of chapman, lennon's killer, and catcher in the rye. icky feeling now."

Reality Hunger is a book-length essay about literature and culture by David Shields that's getting a lot of attention for its provocative key argument: we are wrong to think of fiction as the most exalted form of literature, because as readers we mostly value writings that bring us reality and truth -- which are, by strict definition, beyond the scope of fiction. Shields presents today's literary community as blind and confused, trained to pine after the ideal of the perfect novel, the sublime work of art, when in fact we crave something more primal than artistic excellence when we read.

As we near the top of the Hiphop Masterpieces of the 2000s list, a common thread begins to emerge: business. How to succeed in a cutthroat business environment has always been, to a surprising and largely unrecognized degree, one of hiphop's core lyrical themes. Inspired by films like The Godfather and Goodfellas, following the early lead of EMPD and Q-Tip (who advised that "record company people are shady"), rappers have aligned their egos with their management skills, taking pride in their abilities to compete and win in the rap game (which, Nas famously pointed out, has a lot in common with the crack game). Like the novels of Horatio Alger, modern hiphop offers inspirational stories about working hard, focusing on goals, avoiding traps and pitfalls, coming out on top.