Links of Note for Tuesday

It's a glorious morning in Southern California, and as such, the links:

• Laurel Maury reviews the much discussed Jewel of Medina in the LA Times. "The Jewel of Medina" is a second-rate bodice ripper or, rather, a second-rate bodice ripper-style romance (it doesn't really have sex scenes). It's readable enough, but it suffers from large swaths of purple prose. Paragraphs read like ad copy for a Rudolph Valentino movie. Also of note regarding the much-discussed Jewel ... was this piece in the Guardian regarding how a bookstore should decide whether to carry a controversial book or not. The key question: Will anyone buy it?

• This NY Times article about Idlewild Books, a NYC bookshop that shelves travel guides next to the national literature of that country, reminded me of something Lawrence Weschler once said at a reading of his. He wished that bookstores would shelve all of his books together in a section called "Literature" rather than scattering them about in Art, Biography, Science, etc. It's an interesting idea, but one that, from a booksellers point of view, could quickly become a nightmare.

• Note to authors heading to Kenya for their book tours (which, let's face it, is pretty much everybody, right?): get your papers in order.

• To prepare for Thursday's Nobel Prize announcement -- the complete list of laureates in literature.