I feel Luc Sante's pain. Over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, the critic and blogger wrote a fun and engaging essay about the trouble he's had wrangling his book collection. Like much of Sante's writings, it's leavened with lots of perfectly observed details (such as how the trend in trade paperpacks have made books more frustrating to carry around, "except in the dead of winter"). But this is a love story he's written---a tale about how our books are talismen for bits of our lives, and how they can be exceedingly difficult to let go of.

But is it the books that Sante loves, or himself? He writes:

I'm not a snob about books, but I'm probably a show-off -- as who isn't? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed -- much less commented upon -- my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic. It's rather a closed circle; I impress myself.

It's perfectly unselfish to read and own a lot of books. But as that quote suggests, how you shelve them--and even that you do shelve them--is another matter. Like a lot of heavy readers, I shelve with some concern about appearances---fiction here, nonfiction there, books I turn to often within arms reach, books that feel a little unseemly but which I'm loath to dispose of...

For the past week Japan's Mainichi Daily News has been running an interesting series of interviews with novelist Haruki Murakami. (It may go without saying that Murakami has written some fine novels about Japanese life and the way American culture has a way of weaving its way into it. Everbody who knows his work has particular favorites; mine are Norwegian Wood and Dance, Dance, Dance.) Earlier in the week he spoke about his work as a translator of American classics, The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby most notably. In the interview portion running today, he speaks more broadly about America's role in the post 9/11 world.

"Since [9/11] I get the strong impression that America is like a body that has curled up into a stiff ball," he says. "It's really more a country that uses its muscle with greater flexibility, but it got so stifling there for a while it was almost like you couldn't even tell a joke. There's still a bit of stiffness there now, but it's slowly starting to loosen up."

That statement reminds me of how American fiction writers are still struggling with how to address 9/11. The results are spotty at best. I'm currently making my way through Andre Dubus III's The Garden of Last Days, which fictionalizes the hijackers' trips to strip clubs shortly before the tragedy. I admire its attempt to get into the heads of the terrorists, though its Airport-style structure makes it...

When Google announced a few years back that it was going to undertake digitizing the contents of a number of libraries, a few complaints sprung up---the biggest one being what this meant for copyright holders. But the real issue, Robert Darnton suggests, is more cerebral than legal. In a tremendous must-read essay in the New York Review of Books, "The Library in the New Age," he argues that Google's efforts have supported the false notion that a digitized library will lead to the elimination of brick-and-mortar libraries, and even the physical book.

Darnton, the director of the University Library at Harvard, indulges himself for a moment or two to sing the praises of old-fashioned book: "When I read an old book, I hold its pages up to the light and often find among the fibers of the paper little circles made by drops from the hand of the vatman as he made the sheet-or bits of shirts and petticoats that failed to be ground up adequately during the preparation of the pulp," he writes. The thrust of his piece, however, argues that the physical book is an impermanent thing when it comes to presenting information---newspapers often get the story wrong (or present a deeply imperfect version of events), there are large differences between various Shakespeare texts, and some authors endlessly tweak their books. Voltaire, Darnton points out, was a chief offender on that front, though you don't have to look back to 18th-century France for examples; Galleycat recently...

It took a while for the mainstream media to embrace blogging because so much of what it promised ran counter to what journalists are trained to do. Publish immediately? Well, that's heresy: Pieces need to run by editors and go through some sort of fact-checking process. Say whatever's on your mind? Hogwash: A real journalist, even one who works in the first person, deals in considered contemplation of ideas. Outbound links? Isn't the idea to keep people on your site, where your advertisers are?

All of those worries have died off in recent years. That's partly because media outlets are in a panic in the face of declining revenue, and they'll try anything that will prompt a return to the 20-percent profit margins they used to enjoy. (A ridiculous hope, but that's another post for another day.) But it also comes thanks to the realization that blogging is simply a publishing tool, not a lifestyle, and even if it's coming a few years late, it's nice to see the New Yorker and Harper's launch book blogs, as they both recently have.

The New Yorker blog, Book Bench, is a quick-hit site of updates and links; it does a nice job of finding small bloggable ideas to tinker with (like pondering the history of cricket-themed novels), and doesn't make too much of them. More intimidating, but in many ways much more engaging, is Sentences, a blog on the Harper's Web site written solely (thus far) by critic Wyatt...

Confession: Though I write a blog dedicated to American fiction, I have no real expertise in the works of Gore Vidal. This is a little like saying you're an NBA expert but haven't watched so much as a YouTube video of Michael Jordan, or that you love serious movies but never caught a Jean-Luc Godard film. Vidal's bibliography is enormous, but I've only made a dent in a pair of his books---his very first novel, 1948's modest gay coming-of-age novel The City and the Pillar, and his outrageous, bawdy Hollywood sendup, 1968's Myra Breckinridge, the inspiration, such as it was, for one of the worst movies you'll ever see.

Both are fine books, but I suspect that they're outliers in his oeuvre---they don't have intellectual force or, frankly, the bitchiness so often attributed to him. So I'm having a blast going through some of the old commentaries that he used to write for Esquire magazine in the '60s, and which the magazine has recently placed on its Web site. A 1961 essay in particular is a masterpiece of the kind of book criticism that doesn't really get around much anymore. There's grousing aplenty online these days, but Vidal's piece---a takedown of fuddy-duddy New York Times critic Orville Prescott and selfish bore Ayn Rand---is a genius bit of slow knife-twisting, annihilating their works while using plenty of space to explain why they're worth the opprobrium. Here's Vidal on Prescott's review of Lolita:

He still gives...