Your bookshelves speak volumes…. We’re all ears.

John and Jana Remy, Irvine, California:

Dear John and Dear Jana,

It’s a gray day here in New York City, and I can’t tell you how your shelves have brightened it. First of all, I love that each of you e-mailed me this picture, without, I’m assuming, knowing that the other had. I don’t want to disappoint you, but I have very little critical to say. Normally, when I see a library arranged by color I wonder a bit about the owners: do they think that books are merely decorative? And, if so, do they not know that books look great not arranged by color? And do they not realize that any strict organizational system in a home library seems controlling? In your case, though, I don’t wonder any of those things. Your bright and cheery arrangement is perfectly suited to where you live—what in New York would feel twee seems organic in California. Also, your books sort of lean peacefully into each other in a way that says, Yes there’s order here, but not too much. The titles on your shelves—lots of sci-fi, lots of fantasy, lots of religious history and theory—tell me that you’re dreamers and feelers (dare I say seekers?) first. Your arrangement is not the product of over-thinking, and the bits of clutter here and there back this up.

But the main impression I get from this picture is one of harmony. As if the pleasing double-“J”s of your names and the twin e-mails aren’t proof enough that your family is—sigh—happy, the adorable child ensconced on the couch with a paperback is a dead giveaway. We don’t entirely have control over things like happiness, of course, but I think carving out a space in the house where everyone can gather to read is a good start.

Want your shelf analyzed? E-mail a picture with your name and location to bookbench@gmail.com.

Everyone, it seems, has a blackout story, a tale of what happened when the power was cut and suddenly everything had changed. Though more than forty years have passed, David E. Nye still remembers sitting in the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College in 1965, at the outset of the Great Northeastern Blackout: “I suspected it was a misguided fraternity prank, and I was a bit peeved because I was preparing for a midterm exam,” he writes in his new book, “When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America,” which will be published by M.I.T. on March 31st. Nye—a professor of history and the chair of the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark—has long studied how technological innovation shapes culture. This week, we spoke about the blackout’s place in popular consciousness.

Why blackouts?

I lived through the 1965 and the 1977 blackouts, plus many smaller ones caused by storms, and I also used to talk to my father and others about what it was like before electrification. He grew up in rural New Hampshire. Roughly half of all Americans still lived without it until the end of the nineteen-twenties. And so, after writing books about how the United States was electrified and about Thomas Edison, it seemed logical to write about how people respond to blackouts, and about what it means when the electrical system goes down or is turned off. Every time we invent a technology, we also invent the possibility of its failure. The Wright brothers, it might be said, also invented the plane crash. It's just that we usually focus on how things work, not how they fail.

Why are blackouts so memorable?

Most of the time people are living inside their heads and pursuing some multiple agendas. When the lights fail, unexpectedly we are forced to live entirely in the present, to improvise, to deal with the people right around us instead of ideas in our heads or friends at e-mail remove. Moreover, the present we confront in a blackout is transformed; the world has the same shapes but different shadows and a new soundscape. In New York, the din of subways, stereos, TVs, and several million motors and appliances has suddenly disappeared. This de-familiarized world grabs our attention, it forces us into the now, and the scene is unforgettable later.

You write that blackouts can reveal in people “a spontaneous capacity for kindness and civic solidarity.” Why is that?

I have been told countless stories of neighbors who hardly ever spoke, suddenly reaching out and helping each other or just having a good, long conversation for the first time. One woman told me that she lived in a building near Washington Square and hardly knew anyone else there until the 1965 blackout. That evening everyone gathered in the one apartment that had a gas stove in the kitchen, and they had an impromptu banquet. The friendships forged that evening lasted for many years. In other words, a blackout is not merely an interruption, it pushes people into a new situation, and whether caused by an ice storm in Maine or an overloaded urban system during a heat wave, it can end up making the community stronger.

Some blackouts have led to unrest, though.

Blackouts do not cause certain effects. It is more like people are suddenly thrust into a darkened room where they cannot continue with what they were doing a moment before. They can “read” this darkened space in an infinite number of ways, but a good deal of what they see and sense there is projected from their own minds. If people fear impoverishment and sense that the community is breaking down, as was the case in some parts of New York City in 1977, they may see the blackout as an opportunity for looting. In such cases, the blackout reveals that the bonds of community have frayed to the breaking point.

You write about how the development of the power grid has changed the way we think about night and darkness. Why are we afraid of, or indifferent to, the dark?

This is a very large question, actually, and a detailed answer goes back to pre-modern times. Human beings are not adapted to see as well in the dark as some other species. Before there was much artificial illumination, people did not like to venture out in the dark if they could avoid it, and the night was “peopled” with witches, ghosts, and the like. Indifference is a modern response to the night, made possible by artificial illumination, as people can live in a cocoon of conveniences and quite possibly never even properly see the night. Light pollution is so widespread in the United States that few places now are really dark.

Are blackouts a useful tool for terrorists?

In films and novels, terrorists take out electrical installations far more often than they have in reality. Partly, this is because nature is far more comprehensive in destroying the system than any terrorist could be. A major ice storm will tear down lines everywhere, while bombs will only take out one transmission tower at a time. Utility companies have terrific repair crews who are able to get the juice up and running again. A terrorist who looks hard at this situation will see that attacking the electrical infrastructure may not give much “bang for the buck” compared to other alternatives. Remember, too, that electrical systems have some redundancy built into them, i.e. there are multiple power sources and usually multiple routes to move electricity over the wires, so even before repairs are made, many customers will start getting service again.

What are the biggest challenges facing the American power grid in the coming decades?

Historically, U.S. demand for electricity almost doubled every decade from 1900 until the nineteen-seventies. This has meant, for example, that the nation needed twice as much generating capacity in 1970 as it did in 1960. This explosive growth was unsustainable, and slowed down somewhat after 1970, but not nearly enough. The challenge of the future is to “de-market” electricity, to show people how to live well, even better, while using less of it. In the meantime, the grid needs to be upgraded. At first, it was built a bit haphazardly. Each local utility sought to be largely self-sufficient, buying and selling small surpluses. The problem now is to build a system that allows every consumer to also potentially become a producer. The grid of the future also must find a way to incorporate solar and wind power. This has already been done on a small scale in Germany. However, even with the present grid, Americans would be O.K. if they learned to curb demand.

What can people do?

“Earth Hour,” which comes the last Saturday of March every year, is so important. On that night, people in ninety-two countries will signal to their politicians and corporations that they want to find ways to use less energy, generate less CO2, and live in a sustainable way. The U.S. has been slow to get involved in this “greenout” movement, which is sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. It is really strong in Australia, Canada, and some parts of Europe. So consider turning down the power for one hour that night and send a message!

Book Benchers, I thought I’d never see the day when a blog post inspired by a news article would inspire a work of art, but life is full of surprises. A reader named James Pollack sent this e-mail:

After reading your piece “Rules About Rules About Writing (Or, Why Mush Will Never Triumph),” I was inspired to create a piece of my own that would address and challenge what you say here:

“Reading the piece, I kept thinking, These bytes are simply crying out to be mashed and wikied by the hive, endlessly worked over in the name of increasing the correctness or definitiveness of a master list…. But the Guardian’s survey shows that such a list would be valueless: should any single rule be taken out of context, or tweaked to more closely resemble another, it would lose all meaning. The lists derive their meaning from the strong voices and personalities of the writers who made them, and from their individual works.”

So I remixed all of the Guardian’s content (numbers, authors, “rules”) to see what would happen.

What happened was this flash video, which you can download from mediafire or watch on the Museum of Computer Art Web site.

So what do we think? Should I consider myself properly challenged?

After a week that saw no winner (for shame, players), this week’s baseball contest was like a hanging curve, as they say, a fat one right over the plate. Congratulations to Tim Arnold, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who eagerly awaits the arrival of his beloved Twins and their majestic catcher, Joe Mauer, winner of the 2009 American League M.V.P. award and inspiration for “Joe Mauer Sideburn Night” in 2006.

This week’s covers: “Ball Four,” “Wait Till Next Year,” “Men at Work,” and “Moneyball.”

The Book Club is reading “Drive,” by Daniel H. Pink, in March. Share your thoughts in the comments or join our ongoing conversation in the open thread.

While reading “Drive,” a tuneful ditty from my childhood kept surfacing in my mind:

Who knew Mary Poppins was such a timeless sage? She seems to have encapsulated the Sawyer Effect&#8212admittedly, a little after Twain, but certainly long before Pink’s book. (As proof of her theory, let’s call it the "Sugar Teaspoon" theory, I’ll offer that, as a child, I took her advice to heart, and favored dressing up as Cinderella in pre-princess mode, wearing clothes as tattered as I could find and sweeping the house for ashes, which, lacking a fireplace, were in short supply.) Pink defines the Sawyer Effect as “practices that can either turn play into work or work into play” but his book concentrates on the former, on the way we take the play out of jobs that should be fun, and how we can preserve that element of play.

Here is the problem with that: in every job that must be done, there are things we really don’t want to do. It’s not just a matter of the environment, or the compensation. There are tasks that dull the mind, that I, for one, seem to have no intrinsic motivation to complete. I’ve never found a job that doesn’t incorporate a good number of these. It seems to me&#8212and I'd like to call on Mary Poppins for corroboration here&#8212that creating a happy, productive workplace isn’t just about preserving our intrinsic motivation. It’s also about duping it. After all, Sawyer didn’t make painting fun; he just used reverse psychology to trick the other boys into thinking that it was.

“The novel is dead. Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps,” David Shields writes in “Reality Hunger, a “manifesto” just out from Knopf. What he advocates in its place is a return of the “real” to literature, a realism best captured, he argues, by the collage, the lyric essay, and the memoir. Shields himself follows the collage format: the majority of the book consists of quotes from other writers (“The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels&#8221—Geoff Dyer). He sees the lyric essay and the memoir as very human literary ventures, because, he argues, they allow the reader to witness the writer thinking through the writing process. The novel, on the other hand, presents the reader with a work that is often too perfectly contained: “Plot is for dead people.”

Let’s see how some reviewers feel:

The novelist Jami Attenberg is appreciative of Shields’s critique in Bookforum: “I am grateful for Shields’s sometimes brutal interrogation of what I believe. His critiques led me to reconsider my own creative process. How had I gotten to a particular moment at the end of some book or essay? What had been my intention? What had I wanted the audience to think about my characters—or about me, for that matter? Taking the time to consider these ideas felt extremely decadent—allowing a little bit of the luxurious contemplation Shields would wish for all readers.”

In the Guardian, Blake Morrison, also a novelist, suggests that Shields misses the point of fiction: “Shields sells fiction short. “Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole,” he claims. Does it? Isn’t this patronising to novelist and reader alike? Can’t wresting order out of chaos be a triumph against the odds? And what exactly is this hated creature, the “conventional” or “standard” novel? The premise is that because life is fragmentary, art must be. But poems that rhyme needn’t be a copout. And novels with a clear plot and definite resolution can still be full of ambiguity, darkness and doubt. By the same token, to engage with the dilemmas of an imaginary character means learning to empathise with otherness, and few skills are more important in the world today. Shields has written a provocative and entertaining manifesto. But in his hunger for reality, he forgets that fiction also offers the sustenance of truth.”

Laura Miller is completely exasperated on Salon: “The novel is dead to him, but so what? Can’t he just go off and write whatever he wants to write without climbing up on a soapbox to make a speech about it? How does this offbeat preference of his merit a book-length manifesto? Why does this book exist?”

James Wood finds contradictions in Shields’s argument, in The New Yorker: “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic…Strangely enough, using Shields’s aesthetic terms and most of his preferred writers (along with some of those he seems not to prefer), a passionate defense of fiction and fiction-making could easily be made. Perhaps he will write that book next.”

Lincoln Michel provides a thoughtful and evenhanded response, aptly named “Reality Boredom: Why David Shields is Completely Right and Totally Wrong,” in The Rumpus: “The book is framed by a somewhat incoherent thesis that fiction is dead, narrative is pointless and the premier literary form of the now is the lyric essay (with memoir, it would seem, being a close second). I cannot be the only one to read a supposedly radical manifesto—the book jacket labels detractors as mere defenders of “the status quo”—and be a little disappointed to learn that the novel is dead (again?) and the literature of our bright, hectic future is the lyric essay and memoir. Even the terms “lyric essay” and “memoir” feel dusty sandwiched between discussions of hip-hop and cell phone stories. In short, I read this book with as much disagreement as agreement.”

And my personal favorite is Peter Macia’s response in Fader: “This Dude’s Book is Hip-Hop Album of the Year.”

Mary Gaitskill redefines the domestic sphere.

Penguin's newest imprint, Current, will release popular science books.

The Second Pass turns one! As a present, contributors recommend their favorite out-of-print books.

Jim Behrle's diatribe against careerism in the contemporary poetry scene.

Frederick Raphael lists his favorite conversation novels.

Canada says no to Amazon.

Google joins forces with Italy to digitize the national library archives.

What if the e-book doesn't jump-start a revolution?

You have books. We have a desire to judge you on them.

Angela, Vancouver, Washington:

Angela, I’ve no idea how you’ve done it, but you’ve managed to assemble the book stack of my nightmares. I’m going to assume that, since they all appear to be library books, you’ve done this as a joke, just to make me cringe and avert my gaze and write a hysterical Subconscious Shelf. If this is the case, you should know that it isn’t funny; it’s the equivalent of telling your psychoanalyst that you were beaten as a child when you weren’t. On the other hand, if it isn’t a joke, and you’ve checked out these books in earnest, I guess we’ve got real problems. It appears that you are confused about the following:

Well, you’ve paid your five cents, you’re entitled to some advice. And here it is: there are no shortcuts to knowing, relating to, or loving a human being, yourself included. Nor should there be for getting rich, though the most manipulative people always find a way. The authors of best-selling self-help books which play to readers’ insecurities without, however, offering real help, are among those people. Reading their books is undignified, though also completely understandable, given how horrible life can be. Just be aware that the impulse that causes us to reach for a quick-fix book is the same one that makes us eat an entire box of doughnuts in the middle of the night.

There is one book in your stack of which I approve: “Ten Poems to Change Your Life.” What is the difference, you wonder, between reading something that goes down easy, like “Mars and Venus in the Workplace,” and something like poetry, which requires actual work to digest, if both promise the same general result (enlightenment)? The difference is in the work, and in the commitment to work. If you’re ready to commit, I suggest you sweep this stack off your desk, head back to the library, and check out the Galway Kinnell volume “Three Books,” which contains “Body Rags,” “Mortal Acts, Mortal Words,” and “The Past.” It might take a bit of time to get through, but I promise it will actually change your life.

Want your shelf analyzed? E-mail a picture with your name and location to bookbench@gmail.com.

One of the poems in the magazine this week, Edward Hirsch’s “Liberty Brass,” features a jumbled (or, in this case, what I'd call a rotating) refrain. The line “Automatic Screw Machine Products” becomes “Screw Machine Products Automatic” then “Machine Products Automatic Screw,” and so forth (you can read the full poem online here).

Earlier this week, Hirsch and I discussed his use of the technique.

First off, which do you prefer, Phillips or flathead?

I try not to use screwdrivers myself. I leave it to the experts, like my girlfriend. But I think the two screwdrivers are like the poetry of T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams. You want both.

Aside from the physical antecedent for your rotating refrain, what drew you to it?

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth. I’ve been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats’ ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning. The sign in “Liberty Brass” was an unexpected gift. The idea of a rotating refrain seemed to me to accentuate, turn and change the meaning of the poem.

One of the things that stands out to me is the temporal boundary of “Liberty Brass.” As a meditation, the poem lasts one full rotation of the sign, or, to be more exact, the sign makes one full rotation at the speed of the poem. I am curious to hear some of your thoughts about duration itself as a formal constraint.

Poetry takes place in time. It is a durational. Things take place in sequence. “Liberty Brass” is a small machine that unfolds in a single unpunctuated wave, which is interrupted by the rotating sign, the refrain. Each part is meant to do its work in relentless progression. The idea is to use a time-based art to try to shatter time, to sing against it.

The recent turn in the weather here in New York—a warmer sun and the unmistakable smells of spring—has reminded us that the pros are playing baseball in places like Fort Myers, Clearwater, Port St. Lucie, and in Glendale and Mesa. The slow roll-out of each new season gives way in March to a breezy dash to opening day. That’s just twenty-five days, nine hours, and six minutes away (at last check of this ticker), when the Yankees will play the Red Sox at Fenway Park, in a perfect swirl of “rivalry of the universe” marketing. Meanwhile, we’ll be eying our gloves, waiting for some dry ground for a game of catch.

In honor of spring training (such a better name than the generic “preseason”), we’ve assembled some best-selling titles about baseball. Good luck!

Submit the first fully correct response via e-mail and win a copy of the humor anthology “On the Money: The Economy in Cartoons, 1925-2009.” In the event of confusion, consult our official rules. We’ll announce the winner tomorrow afternoon.

Yesterday, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas announced their acquisition of the David Foster Wallace archive. The archive was assembled by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and Bonnie Nadell, his long-time literary agent, from the mess of papers he had stashed in a dark garage overrun with spiders. Nadell wrote in a blog post: “I know there were people who felt David was too much of a ‘look ma no hands’ kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are.”

So what exactly is in the collection? We spoke with Molly Schwartzburg, the curator of British and American Literature at the Ransom Center. The bulk, she told us, is comprised of the manuscript materials for his novels, including multiple drafts of “Infinite Jest” and “Broom of the System,” a single draft of “Girl with Curious Hair,” and annotated drafts for nearly all of his non-fiction essays, including several notebooks for “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.”

There are also some two hundred books from Wallace’s own library. “Virtually all of the books are annotated, many are heavily annotated,” Schwartzburg said, and noted that Wallace was especially fond of taking notes and compiling vocabulary lists on the inner cover. The collection, heavy on contemporary fiction, contains nearly all of Wallace’s friend Don DeLillo’s novels, including some pre-publication typescripts. Other titles include Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” and “The Tipping Point,” and Jonathan Franzen’s “Strong Motion.” “Unfortunately,” Schwartzburg said, “there does not appear to be a copy of ‘The Corrections.’ ”

There is, however, a paperback copy of Mary Higgins Clark’s pulpy suspense novel “Where are the Children?” “I have no context for it, but it looked like he was doing a rhetorical analysis of how gender relationships were playing out over the course of the novel,” Schwartzburg told me. “He appeared to really engage with her and looked carefully at how she structured her narrative. Clearly, he read very widely.” There’s even a marked-up edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, in which Wallace circled words like “witenagemot.”

For Wallace scholars, the real jewel in the crown might be a battered, taped-together copy of Pam Cook’s “The Cinema Book,” used as research for “Infinite Jest.” His handwritten notes include multiple references to “IJ” and, according to a blog post by Scwartzburg, display a “particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the ‘gangster/crime film’).”

The archive also contains an extensive amount of writing from Wallace’s childhood and youth: a whimsical childhood poem about vikings, signed “David Foster Wallace”; school essays about “Pride and Prejudice” and “Moby Dick”; four issues of “Sabrina,” the Amherst humor magazine he co-founded with his roommate, Mark Costello. For an author who leapt with astonishing rapidity from youthful promise into adult virtuosity, the juvenilia may prove especially illuminating.

Of course, the archive, which will become available to the public this fall, is missing one crucial element: material related to his posthumous novel, “The Pale King.” Once the book is published—sometime next year, according to the latest reports—the Ransom Center will inherit this mountain of manuscripts. At this point, Wallace fans will be able to take cold comfort in the fact that his archive is finally complete.

For more on Wallace, see D. T. Max’s Life and Letters from 2009. And for more on the Ransom Center and why great writers’ work ends up there, see Max’s 2007 Letter from Austin.

• “If you were to see a viking today, it’s best that you go some other way,” wrote a young but wise Wallace in “Viking Poem.” Note the early use of his signature as “David Foster Wallace” at the top of the page.
• A page from David Foster Wallace’s American Heritage Dictionary. He’s circled the definition of the word “fraktur,” which, in case you were wondering, is a “stylized, highly decorative watercolor or watercolor-and-ink painting in the Pennsylvania-German tradition.”
• One of Wallace’s many vocabulary lists, this one includes the word “primipara,” defined as a “woman who’s pregnant for the first time.”
• One of the first pages of a handwritten draft of “Infinite Jest.”
• Page one of a letter from the editor Michael Pietsch to David Foster Wallace regarding his draft of “Infinite Jest.” Pietsch writes, “It’s exactly the challenge and adventure I came to book publishing to find.”
• Though on page two Pietsch urges a reluctant Wallace to shorten the book. “The longer it is, the more people will find excuses not to read it.”
• In a bound copy of “Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest,” Wallace notes the proper age of one of his characters, Hal Incandenza, using a rather apt sticky note.
• The archive includes two-hundred heavily annotated books, including this copy of Don DeLillo’s “Players.”
• The playful Wallace gave Cormac McCarthy a pair of glasses on this copy of “Suttree.” He also noted “set-up is slow—does not set stage.”
• Though the collection contains little personal correspondence, a letter to Wallace from Jim Harrison was found in a copy of “Saving Daylight.” Harrison writes, “Wish you luck in that Wal Mart of words, Am. Publishing.”

(All images courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.)

The beloved Brooklyn bookstore Bookcourt is launching a new literary journal, "Cousin Corrine's Reminder."

Meet President Bush's twenty-eight-year-old ghostwriter, Christopher Michel.

Who's responsible for inaccurate books, publishers or authors?

One dead tree lover converts to e-reading.

How young adult books became safe for grown-ups.

The New York Times will make its Sunday book review available as a stand-alone e-reader application.

The actress and singer Hilary Duff signs a deal to write tween books for Simon & Schuster.

Eric Hill on his iconic creation Spot the Dog.

Author John Edgar Wideman will self-publish his new short story collection, "Brief: Stories for the Palm of the Mind."

You and your bookshelves, analyzed through the ether by the unprofessionals at the Book Bench.

Chris Cook, Chandler, Arizona

Chris, the human body, when propped up in the vertical position, is divided, very broadly speaking, into two thematic zones: the upper realm, to which belong the intellect and the emotions, and the lower realm, where, it might be said, our baser impulses dwell. Your house respects this division: books and precious objects breathe the rarefied air near the ceiling, while the lower level has been transformed into a garden of earthly delights. I like that your "serious space" has a touch of whimsy: teddy bears, toy horses, a ceramic Madonna, but I'm also troubled. Were these playthings once the belongings of children, and have those children flown away? And are you saddened by their absence? Or are these the remnants of your own youth? Recall the tale of the Velveteen Rabbit, its coat rubbed off, turned real by love, only to be contaminated with scarlet fever and consigned to the flames. The rabbit, of course, is rescued by a kindhearted fairy, but the point is that I fear none of your stuffed animals—and, perhaps, none of your books—are being given the kind of love they deserve. The kind of love that rubs their fur off and cracks their spines and brings the most cherished of them to the brink of ruin. In short, I worry that you are keeping your higher instincts too separate from your lower, your adult self too separate from your childhood self (which is obviously still quite present). Don't forget to bring your objects to life every once in a while—climb that ladder, pull down several things at once, and let them enjoy all the pleasures of a sunny Arizona day.

Want your shelf analyzed? Send a picture with your name and location to bookbench@gmail.com.

This week, I sat down with Zachary and some of his favorite picture books.

These are beautiful books, Zachary. Can you tell me a little bit about them?

I want to see “Where the Wild Things Are.”

What is your favorite page in “Wild Things”?

When Max was chasing the dog with a fork.

Why is that your favorite?

Because, look. See, there he is! There’s the dog with the fork!

How do you think he feels?

Sad.

Who—Max, or the dog?

The dog. And look. [He points to the picture on the wall in this illustration.] A monster.

Watch. He says “I will eat you up!” And look [turning the pages]. Trees are growing [in Max’s room]. And he goes to where the wild things are.

How do you think Max feels about that?

Happy!

Looks like it, yeah.

Monsters are coming, but first there’s gonna be a sea monster.

It looks very big. [I attempt a growl.] Do you think they make noises like that?

They go STOMP STOMP STOMP!

With their feet?

Yeah. But Max blames them.

Blames them for what?

“Be Still!”’

“Be still?” Oh—he TAMES them, with a magic trick.

Yeah, tames them … He’s the king now.

What’s happening here?

They’re tired, without supper.

Why don’t they get any supper?

Because they—because they’re not hungry! But look, they want to eat him.

But he says what?

“Goodbye!” And then they gnash their terrible claws.

Right, terrible. Do you think he’s having fun in his boat?

No, he’s just sleeping in it.

Can you imagine what would happen if trees grew in your room? Do you think that could happen?

No, it never happened!

Never?

No.

So why does it happen to Max?

Because they started to grow.

But it never happens anywhere else?

Not it my room—because there are no holes!

Oh—no holes for a tree to grow in.

Yeah. Because my floor is sticked together.

What about these other books?

This is “Tuesday.”

What beautiful drawings. What’s this one about?

It’s about frogs flying on one Tuesday. “Tuesday,” by David Weisner.

These frogs have very funny faces.

Yeah, because they’re different! That one frog is looking down.

What do you think they’re talking or—croaking about?

Some are sleeping, but I think they’re doing jokes.

What kinds of jokes?

I think this one’s saying “BAHBAHBAH!” That’s a joke. You know, I think we can’t go through all this.

No?

No, because it’s a very long book.

Here’s another David Weisner book. “The Three Pigs.”

Yeah. By David Weisner.

Will you help me look at it?

Well, look, he blowed his house!

Oh, it says “Hey, he blew me right out of the story!” So now the wolf can’t find the pig. And the pigs keep the wolf inside the page?

Yeah, so they can make an airplane out of him.

Now what happened here? Why does this picture look so different from the others?

They went in THIS story.

So they’re learning to go in and out of all these books?

Uh huh, and they said, “Let’s get out of here.” Because that’s a silly story for babies. O.K., here it goes: “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.”

Well done. That’s called a nursery rhyme—but you think it’s silly? You don’t like how it sounds?

I do.

If you could be like these pigs and go into any story that you wanted to, of all the stories that you know, which one would you go into?

I would go into the dragon and the golden rose.

Here’s another book, “The Curious Garden.”

Yeah.

Do you ever work in the garden like this little boy in the story?

Yeah, with my mom, watering my plants.

So, Zachary, all these stories are about little boys. Do you know any stories about little girls?

Um, no. Actually, I do. There is one that is for my friend Julia. It’s called, “Where’s the little girl?”

You don’t think that one is for you?

No. I don’t think so. [He runs away.]

(Photograph: Matt Carr)

The music T-shirt: a badge of identity, a protest, a security blanket, overworn, overloved, destined to be stuffed into a dresser drawer and forgotten, come across years later and greeted somewhat sadly, a memento mori of a wilder, younger time.

Unless your mother throws all your music T-shirts away. Then the music T-shirt becomes your albatross, dooming you to a life spent trawling second-hand clothing stores and eBay. Such is the fate of Cesar Padilla, the owner of the vintage boutique Cherry, in the West Village. When he was growing up in California in the seventies and eighties, Padilla frequented rock shows on the Sunset Strip, and began building a music T-shirt collection. A trip to South America in 1988 ended in horror: he returned home to find that his mother had cleaned house. Since then, he writes at the beginning of "Ripped," a book out this month from Universe, he's been attempting to reassemble his "misspent California youth."

"Ripped" comprises photographs of two hundred T-shirts from the post-punk period, "after the submission of 1960's rock 'n' roll to mass popularity and before the onset of ironic consumerism." Which is to say, the period of T-shirts that make you look extremely cool, from bands that were extremely cool. The Sex Pistols, The Fall, Holler Disco, The Runaways, Ike and Tina Turner, Cocaine Cowboys, The Shangri-Las, The Kinks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag (to name a few). Some are glossed by cool people—Thurston Moore, Judy Nylon, Betsey Johnson—and Lydia Lunch (whose own T-shirts I'd totally wear to bed) wrote the introduction. For her, the music T-shirt aficionado in those days was someone who valued individuality: "You can't buy style any more than you can fake a rebellion just by buying a ready-made carbon copy of what a million other clueless fools are wearing this season."

• Van Fuckin' Halen.
• Grace Jones.
• Buzzcocks.
• Sonic Youth.
• Sober Up, Bitch!

(All images copyrighted "Ripped: T-Shirts from the Underground," by Cesar Padilla, Universe, 2010.)

If you are like me, and keep buying more books despite the precarious piles stacked next to your already filled bookshelf, then maybe you should try out BookMooch.com. It’s essentially a book-for-book barter system in which you get a point for sending someone a book, and you lose one point for each book you “mooch.” There are some other helpful stipulations: you earn three points for sending a book internationally and 1/10th of a point for leaving feedback for a swap well done. You can search for books by language, country of origin, and (more interestingly) most “wishlisted” and most available ("The Da Vinci Code" is a contender for that title, with four hundred and ninety-two copies up for mooching). It seems like an ingenious way to save money (and space!) for those of us looking to update our libraries. Do you participate? Leave a comment with your thoughts on the system.

A new release of "Finnegans Wake" will include 9,000 changes.

Tony Judt's battle with Lou Gehrig's disease.

Ed Park explores the intersection between role-playing games and fiction.

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood is the composer for the film adaptation of "Norwegian Wood."

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas is now home to the David Foster Wallace archives.

Does superstar translator Edith Grossman overlook the flourishing independent translation scene?

Byron Coley and Thurston Moore talk about poetry and books about the Velvet Underground.

A video of how a book cover is designed.

Lie back, relax, let the good doctors at the Book Bench analyze the contents of your bookshelf.

From Tony, Trumbull, Connecticut.

Tony, you’re going to want to be careful with those teetering piles—I had a similar thing going on at my desk last week, and when I pulled one book from the bottom, all Jenga-like, it caused a landslide that knocked over my iced coffee and utterly ruined my keyboard. I know what you’re thinking: iced coffee in March? In New York? Focus, Tony. The point is that while your system is aesthetically pleasing and features all the “right” authors—Updike, Agee, Chekhov, Keats, Capote, Orwell, and Roth, with a little Wells Tower thrown in—it does so at the expense of practicality and, furthermore, safety. Could the same be true of other aspects of your life? Do you worry about important things like accumulating a deeper understanding of the universe through literature while duller matters fall by the wayside? The light on your desk perfectly illuminates the spines of your books (and the photos of your loved ones), but what lurks in the shadows? I fear it may be the cable bill. Consider this a reminder that it's due.

Want your shelf analyzed? E-mail a picture with your name and location.

You recall the story of the Ten Commandments: Mount Sinai is covered in a big black cloud of smoke because God has descended upon it in a literal blaze of glory. He calls to Moses to come up into the cloud, but to leave the Israelites behind, lest He “break forth” upon them and they all die. So Moses goes up to see God, and there are trumpets blaring and thunder crashing and lightning flashing, and God tells Moses the ten laws, and then he tells him many other laws, and all told Moses is up there with God for forty days and forty nights, all the while surrounded by this big black cloud. Then God gives him the tablets with the Commandments, and Moses carries them down and—doh!—sees the people worshipping a little golden cow, and smashes the tablets, because his “anger waxed hot.” So hot, in fact, that he makes them drink their precious cow, once he’s burnt it down and mixed the ash into some water. So the Israelites have been taught a lesson (or the beginning of one—they also get “plagued” after they finish drinking their cow-ash), but so has Moses, because now thanks to that terrible temper of his he has to go back up into the cloud to get two replacement tablets. So up he goes for another forty days and forty nights, and this time when he comes back down with the tablets, everyone knows it’s for real because the “skin of his face” is blindingly shiny, and no one can look at him unless he puts something over his head.

In other words, it was a big production. Like, stupid big. So I guess it makes sense that when Christopher Hitchens decided to come down from whatever mountain he’s been on to deliver his own Ten Commandments, he wouldn’t just film himself with his laptop camera and send it out over Chatroulette. No, he’d get a whole team of video producers at Vanity Fair to do it up right. A green screen has been employed, in front of which stands a serious Hitchens in a nice grey suit, just a touch of shine on his forehead. There are images, and elevator music, and text of what he’s saying helpfully scrawled in front of him. And even a cloud, though one not visible to the naked eye. Maybe there’s no mountain and no lightning and no trumpets and no stone tablets, but the transmission of knowledge in the digital age TOTALLY ROCKS—just like these dudes say it does. I mean, just try smashing Hitchens’s Commandments without smashing your computer. So push that bubble of hysteria rising in your throat down, put your headphones on, lie back in your chair, and (this is a commandment) enjoy the video.

Carolyn Kellogg has an interesting piece in the L.A. Times about the evolution of the book tour, from a publishing-house-backed fifteen-or-so-city tour in which the author reads, meets, and signs at bookstores to self-funded tours of a much smaller scope, where the author might find lodgings on couchsurfing.com. Kellogg cites two main factors: dwindling budgets (or, at least, shifting priorities) at publishing houses and the disappearance of bookstores across the country (so that even the biggest authors now find themselves at Costco). What does this mean for readers and writers? she asks:

If things continue on their current trajectory, book tours will become striated by class. Elite authors will go where they can reach big audiences, while others will have to work the angles to propel a trip on the road.

It's a shame because, for all the hoopla surrounding the latest celebrity memoir, readers are rarely drawn to books by hype machines. We get turned on by trusted friends, by the local bookseller, by a reading, even by a newspaper review. "It was exciting to get a lot of different reviews in regional newspapers," [Dan] Chaon says, "but it just doesn't happen that much anymore."

Technology can help, but it has limits. Reading an online Q&A with Walter Mosley isn't the same as hearing him speak or waiting in line to shake his hand. If authors never get farther from home than they can travel in a day, they'll have a hard time extending their reach; as readers, we'll become increasingly provincial.