The Reading Pile

The other day, I was talking with a fellow English student at work. We were talking about how we read, how much we read, and why we read. We both realized that we usually read at least 50 books a year. This apparently puts us in the top something percent of readers in the world, but I suppose we have an unfair advantage in being English students. Like workers in a Siberian gulag, we are forced to do it. Personally, this semester I was assigned 16 books; so far I've read fourteen. But it was in the personal arena that we both realized how similar we were. We weren't monogamists, and in fact were more like serial kink enthusiasts. There was the book that was easily portable, and went into the backpack. And then there was the respectable book you had been "reading" for so long you were ashamed to bring it out of the house. This is not to be confused with the book that's too big to lug around, and is read before bed. So, in the interests of science, here's a look at my current reading pile, and the various phenotypes represented therein. Compare and contrast with your own.

And so the random links for today are literature-themed:
Forgotten Bookmarks. I once found a letter from the Netherlands, in Dutch, in a copy of the French Lieutenant's Woman.
From the McGill Daily, a write-up on the Scott Pilgrim series. Mr. Weisler works at my job, and I can assure you he is a most excellent person as well as a good writer.
Anthony Lane on Beckett's letters.
Lizzie Skurnick on why a web critic should mourn for print journalism.