"After a short while, he realised that somebody was watching him from a distance ...": good review, great anecdote about the sociologist Erving Goffman.
• Not sure that this is, in fact, a lucky time to have had a Michael Jackson biography in the works; some degree of additional competition seems likely.
• There must be a sensible answer to the question "What happens when you water a plant that's in a pot made out of a book?" But the site where that site found the image is in kanji, so my chances of finding out directly are slim. Are there any bored readers of Japanese in the house?
• At the time of writing, traffic for Edward Champion's excellent what-were-you-thinking interview with Alain de Botton appears to be adversely affecting his site, so here's the key quote reproduced somewhere else.
• The return of The Baffler.
• On the scholarly uncertainty of David Foster Wallace's fiction.
• Despite the best efforts of British newspapers, this one included, it seems that the top-100-books-ever-ever habit is still predominantly American; that, at least, is what you'd guess from Newsweek's booklistlist-generated booklist.
