• This list of authors’ annotations to books in their personal libraries is truly fantastic. (The above is, obviously, David Foster Wallace’s.)
• In a letter, Rudyard Kipling admits that “it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously” to material from other writers while writing The Jungle Book. Probable, even!
• Now we’re all really self-conscious about how we pronounce pecan.
• The National Book Critics Circle is introducing a new awards category, for first books in any genre.
• “One hundred and eighteen miles north of London, in the town of Boston, England, there lives a retired newspaperman named John Richards who is experiencing an unusually rotten spring. Richards is the founder and chairman of something called the Apostrophe Protection Society. His world, at least as related to the tiny mark that denotes possessives and the omission of letters from certain words, appears to be crashing down around him.”