It’s Monday, and I’m drinking coffee in the afternoon. A lot is happening on the internet, and you need to know about all of it. Here are a few of the choicest items:

• If you aren’t already, you simply must — must! — visit The Diary of Suri Cruise: “Don’t tell me to button up my cardigan! I’ll button it up if I want to and if I get cold. Right now, I’m comfortable. No. No. No. No. No. No. Don’t come down here to do it. I can do it. Look! See! I can do it myself. I’m just going to button the top and bottom buttons to freak you out! Look at these unbutton buttons! Just flopping in the breeze………BLERGH! I’m just grumpy because they were out of the Apple Pie Milk Shake at lunch. I read about this amazing Apple Pie Milk Shake on Eater and I’ve been looking forward to it for months and they ran out! How do you run out! And how do you say no to a small child when she says it’s her birthday!? No, I do not want to go to Jack In The Box for a milkshake. I just need a nap and an apple pie in milkshake form. Mostly, a nap.” Oh, but it’s so much funnier with the images. Good times.

• This has been around the web for a bit now, but I’ve just read it: Zach Braff responsible for the sorry state of…well, everything. Seriously, though, the author of this piece makes the argument that Garden State brought to dominance a strain of indie folk rock that is largely acoustic and kind of dull. I’m not entirely sure I agree with that argument (I’m more inclined to agree with the commenter who pointed to the VW “Pink Moon” commercial as the beginning of all that), but it’s kind of a fun read. What do you think?

• Dear Caulfields is a website that has compiled all of the uncollected work of J.D. Salinger, including the elusive “Hapworth 16, 1924.” When I was a younger man, I was obsessed with finding that book and reading it. I never did. Now, it’s been such a long time since i last read Salinger, I don’t think I’d even remember the character names. It’d be like visiting a country I lived in as a little boy. Anyway, if you’re the sort who wants to read more Salinger, get there quickly before his lawyers shut the site down. (via More Blog About Buildings and Food)

• And finally: Penguin has a board game. It’s called “Bookchase.” It looks pretty great. The holidays are coming, after all. (via Debbie Stier’s tumblr blog Some Things I Like)

Yesterday, Oprah Winfrey confirmed reports that she will be canceling her television program in 2011. This will leave a void in the lives of millions who watch Oprah fawn over celebrities and admonish less-than-truthful memoirists on a daily basis. That stretch, that yawning stretch between four and five pm, what will come of it? How will we find out about the new pashmina, the new soap that we simply must have.

Where will we find out about books? Ms. Winfrey has been the lone kingmaker in the book world since starting her book club over a decade ago. (For a great history of Oprah’s book club, check out Max’s rundown at The Millions.) But that’s about to end. Of course, she’ll still have her magazine, whose book section is helmed by former Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, and she’ll have that cable channel she’s been planning. Maybe there will be a whole series about books. Imagine that.

While I’m obviously joking around a bit here (if you’ll recall, I’m not much of an Oprah fan), the book world is right to be concerned. Books could use a good advocate at the moment. I don’t think it’s a secret that these are dark days in the bookland, and Oprah’s departure makes it a little bit darker. Here was someone with a national platform who chose to take a portion of it and use it to talk about books. So what does it mean now that she won’t be doing that? It means we’re all going to have to talk about books ourselves.

Sure Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert could step in and be the hipster version of Oprah’s book pushing muscle, but I think the real answer to “Who will fill the Oprah void?” is you. And me. It’s up to those of us who read to become proselytizers for books and for reading in general. Talk about books with your friends. If you ever find yourself in a boring conversation, toss this line out there: “What are you reading right now?” If they don’t have an answer, tell them about something you read recently. Join Goodreads. Or if that isn’t your cup of tea, participate in Litchat or one of the many twitter book clubs that come up on a regular basis. Start a book club or join one that’s already happening. (Here are the one’s we host at the store.) Blog about your books as part of your everyday life.

If books and reading and ideas are important to you, you shouldn’t need a billionaire cult of personality to tip you off to the good ones. People complain all the time about the decline of literary culture, and there a lot of scapegoats. “They don’t teach kids to love reading.” “The books aren’t as good as they used to be.” “There are too many books.” All of these things might be partially true, but the real truth is one that hurts: if literary culture declines, it’s going to be because of us, because we stopped reading and because we stopped valuing it. Don’t let that happen. Take this opportunity to help make books an exciting part of the world, with or without Oprah.

On The Morning News today, V.L. Hartmann has a piece about Joan Didion’s resonance with a new generation of writers, many of them women:

For some of us, mimicking Joan Didion has become the height of literary ambition, and not just her sentences. “Goodbye to All That” is a jumping-off point, California will fall short of its promise, but there is always Hawaii, and a penthouse, even when you are broke. There is a husband across the hall in his own study in your house in Malibu while you write. This is the Joan Didion who is forever leaning out of that Stingray with a cigarette in her hand. She appeared to be living in her sentences, and it was this intimacy that took me everywhere that she had been, even in the decades before I was born. The text might say it was hard, but the style makes it look easy.

It’s a fine essay, and one that manages to get at the fascination with Didion — one part literary stylist and one part just plain style. Didion’s lifestyle, more than her life itself, is an object of lust among many young artistic types I know. Luxurious, but detached. Glamorous and thoughtful at the same time. Sure, you go to the Oscars every year — and more importantly, the Vanity Fair Oscar part — but you keep a little Moleskine in your handbag or your back pocket and you sneak off to the restroom to jot down notes for a piece in Esquire or The New Yorker.

I’ll admit to a certain level of Didion fantasizing of my own. I’m married to a fiction writer, for God’s sake. Of course we harbor idealized Didion-Dunne fantasies. In my version of the fantasies, I get to be Joan Didion. Or at least, I get to write like her. For me, it’s her prose that I’m envious of. Take the opening paragraphs of her novel Play It As It Lays:

What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.

Another example, one which springs to mind because Mrs. Burstein saw a pygmy rattler in the artichoke garden this morning and has been intractable since: I never ask about snakes. Why should Shalimar attract kraits. Why should a coral snake need two glands of neurotoxic poison to survive while a king snake, so similarly marked, needs none. Where is the Darwinian logic there. You might ask that. I never would, not any more. I recall an incident reported not long ago in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: two honeymooners, natives of Detroit, found dead in their Scout camper near Boca Raton, a coral snake still coiled in their thermal blanket. Why? Unless you are prepared to take the long view, there is no satisfactory “answer” to such questions.

This is stylish prose. Look at how she phrases a series of questions but does so without question marks. Because she doesn’t ask those questions, not any more. These two paragraphs, in my opinion, are among the best opening lines to a novel ever. They propel the reader forward because they leave open so much. Why doesn’t she ask those questions any more? But also, I think, the paragraphs stylistically invite the reader in. They hint at a world without revealing it. The sentences themselves aren’t difficult to read, but they offer enough resistance that a reader might look at them again. They’re tone-setters, and brilliant ones at that.

Thinking about Didion’s style got me thinking about another great stylist, Sam Lipsyte. I’m about 2/3 finished with Lipsyte’s new novel The Ask (due in March from FSG), and the prose is so remarkable, so unique. Check out the opening paragraphs from The Ask:

America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic’s whoremaster days were through. Whither that frost-nerved, diamond-fanged hustler who’d stormed Normandy, dick-smacked the Soviets, turned out such firm emerging market flesh? Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of Mad Dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves.

“We’re the bitches of the First World,” said Horace, his own eyes braziers of delight.

We all loved Horace, his clownish pronouncements. He was a white kid from Armonk who had learned to speak and feel from a half-dozen VHS tapes in his father’s garage. Besides, here at our desks with our turkey wraps, I did not disagree.

The wordiness — and I mean that in a good way — the jumbled, frantic pace of the writing, it overwhelms, doesn’t it? The proper names mixed in with all those hyphenated compound adjectives and verbs — “frost-nerved,” “diamond-fanged,” “dick-smacked” — it’s an onslaught. What does this prose tell you about the book to come? For one thing, it tells you that the book will be about excess, in some way, about extravagance or decadence. It not only tells you this, through Horace’s little speech about America, but it also shows you this, through this blitzkrieg of prose. Pretty brilliant, huh?

The Lipsyte passage, I gather, isn’t for everyone. The book, brilliant though it is, demands something from the reader. It offers, in my opinion, a little more resistance than the Didion. It’s not that Lipsyte’s novel is confusing or even difficult, really, but some of those sentences get a little sticky, and I wonder if this stickiness is what has prevented him from blowing up into the enormously popular writer I think he ought to be. In the past two weeks, I’ve laughed so hard while reading this book on the Metro that five people have moved to other seats to avoid being near me. That’s how great of a writer he is, and yet, his sales, from what I can tell, don’t yet match his talent. Either the marketing departments of his publishers are failing him or his style doesn’t attract that many people. Maybe when folks pick up a Lipsyte book, that first paragraph doesn’t just leap off the page at them. They might enjoy the book if they gave it some time, but come on, who gives anything time anymore?

I think of Sam Lipsyte often when considering the future of literary fiction. See, if we can’t sell Sam Lipsyte, something is wrong. Something, somewhere, is broken. But how to fix it? Some people feel that “crowdsourcing” or whatever buzz term you’d like to apply to it is the future of all content. Put it out there, and let the market decide what’s worthwhile. If enough people “digg it” or whatever, it will rise to the top, much like a blog post or an article would. This can work, and does work, for certain kinds of content. But it can’t work for everything. If a book like Home Land (Lipsyte’s first book) or The Ask doesn’t pass the browse-test, how is it going to fair in a digital marketplace, where it doesn’t have the benefit of physical placement? I worry about this. Can we mass-curate literary fiction? If we try to, what might happen to writers whose style is difficult or challenging?

You didn’t think a Monday could pass without some good stuff happening on the internet, did you? Today, we have an eclectic mix of the good, the bad and the incredibly strange from around the web. Dig in:

• Paste Magazine is running a whole bunch of best-of lists for the past decade, including Best Memes, Best Comedians (No Louis CK? Inconceivable), and Best American Breweries. Here is their list of the 20 best books. What do you think? No Michael Pollan? Sacrilege. Still, while I don’t personally agree with some (many) of the choices, I give them credit for trying to distill all of the books — fiction and non-fiction alike — into one twenty book list. What this selection of lists proves is that the fastest way to piss someone off on the internet is to make a list. (via Kottke)

• You may not have heard (yeah, right) but Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue goes rogue all over the US tomorrow. She was on Oprah today, and both The Awl and The Washington Post had some entertaining running commentary. Additionally, Slate explains why Ms. Palin is tearing apart the Republican Party. The Second Pass opines that the cover of the book looks more like an Old Navy ad than a book cover. Doncha know.

• And finally, Xiaoda Xiao, whose book The Cave Man will be published in December, writes about his experience in a Chinese forced labor prison at The Huffington Post. His crime? Accidentally tearing a poster of Mao. Suddenly, Sarah Palin seems so much more tolerable.

Today is the 115 birthday of Vroman’s Bookstore. The store was founded by A.C. Vroman on November 14, 1894. While we’ve moved locations once, we have been continuously operated and independently owned ever since. I don’t think I have to tell anyone what an accomplishment that is. It’s a testament to the incredible community here in Southern California, a place that is as passionate about books as anywhere in the world.

For a little perspective, think about all of the things that didn’t even exist when Vroman’s was founded.

• In 1894, “new media” would have meant radio, which was just being demonstrated for the first time a few months earlier.
• The Ford Model T was still twenty years away.
• The new and noteworthy table at the store would’ve had stacks of The Jungle Book, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Das Kapital (Glenn Beck would’ve had a fit).

We wouldn’t be celebrating this birthday if it weren’t for our valued customers. You’re all truly part of the Vroman’s story, and we humbly thank you for the years of support. Here’s hoping some blogger gets to write a post like this (using the computer he had embedded in his cerebral cortex at birth, no doubt) in honor of the 230th birthday of the store.

I’m not sure why but I’m a little bit down on the typical static blog at the moment (And, no, the irony of writing that on just such a blog isn’t lost on me). Every morning I open my Google Reader and see upwards of 500 unread posts, and I die a little bit. It’s a numeric representation of all the great stuff that’s out there on the net, just waiting to be discovered. It’s also indicative of all the not-so-great stuff out there, the stuff I’ll have to wade through to find the nuggets (For some reason, I feel the need to read the not-so-good stuff, too). And even if I somehow got through all those unread posts — a feat that most days feels as difficult as plowing a cornfield with a fork — I’d have done so by having spent hours on a single plain white website. This is, I’ve decided, incredibly boring. So this really isn’t about the blogs, per se, but rather my extreme dissatisfaction with the way their content is delivered to me. In short, I hate my RSS reader. More to the point, I hate RSS readers.

What has felt a little more fun, a little more happening, are feeds. I’m talking about Twitter and Tumblr, mainly, though Facebook, at its best, gives me what I’m talking about. I’ve been putting a bit of thought into why this kind of web interaction feels more compelling to me, and what I’ve come up with is curation. When I look at Google Reader, it’s essentially a bunch of sites that I found. While they’ve tried to build in a social aspect to the reader, I haven’t been able to make it work for me.

But a feed — like my tumblr feed or my twitter stream — that’s content curated by other people. Sure I decided who to follow, but the links, the posts, and the tweets that those feeds bring to me (this is key–they come to me!) are selected by other people. I find that this leads me further off into the web, and facilitates discovery and serendipity much better than the static blog set up.

As such, I thought I’d use this Friday afternoon post to point you to a few great sites that came to me through my feed. It’s kind of like my own Follow Friday.

• I’ve blogged before about You Might Find Yourself, but I will link to it here again and recommend it to anyone interested in fashion and photography, especially men’s fashion. YMFY consistently posts the most gorgeous clothing presented in the most pleasing way. Through in the occasional shot of a beautiful model or a thoughtful article, and it’s pretty much the perfect Tumblr blog.
• Also on the fashion blog front is Put This On, another Tumblr blog that offers great fashion content for men. More of a guide than YMFY, PTO offers shopping and style tips, and recently featured a video about denim shot partially in Pasadena. (A word to the wise, though: Don’t start following this blog if you don’t want to buy some clothes. It’s simply too painful.)
• LOLerature is exactly what it sounds like: LOLCats for book lovers. The tagline for the blog is “I CAN HAZ CANON?”
• If you enjoy laughing, you must follow some of the funny Twitterers out there, including Twitter superstar Just_Alison. Not only is she very funny, but she’s a fan of Vroman’s.

Enjoy your weekends everyone.

The internet is all about book jackets today, and why shouldn’t it be. It’s November now, and the weather is turning cool. Books need their jackets, and so do you. Of course, it’s low-80s outside in Pasadena, so…On to the links!

• The Second Pass links to an upcoming show at the UCB Theater in New York called “You Should Judge a Book By Its Cover.” The show, put on by comedian Patrick Borelli, will critique the 30 worst book covers of all time. It sounds like fun. As a bonus, Borelli made a short video featuring three designers discussing their craft and looking at a few jackets. It’s good viewing, if for no other reason than to hear Chip Kidd talk. He’s very funny.

• The Casual Optimist talks with legendary designer David Pearson. Pearson has been designing books about Penguin’s design history for quite some time now. Click through to see some downright pornographic shots of book covers as well as the gasp-inducing Penguin archive.

• Jason Kottke links to designer Olympia Le-Tan, who designs handbags that look like book covers. (Via We Love You So)

No, that’s not the name of a chapter from a Michael Pollan book, though it could be. In this short video, we again visit with Sherri Gallentine, as well as drop in on my wife Edan as she prepares to cook dinner.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Note: the theory about animals that I put forth during the horse section isn't mine. It's from an academic essay I read years ago. I tried to figure out who wrote it, but if one of you fine viewers knows, please drop a line in the comments so that he or she may get credit.]

All this week, my wife and I have refrained from eating any factory farm meat, though in reality, we rarely eat this meat anyway. The one meal with meat that we ate was a sausage pasta from this fine Jamie Oliver cookbook. The sausage was from Rocky Canyon Farms. We purchased it from the farmer at the Hollywood Farmers Market. Vroman’s Bookstore would like to ask everyone to take this week and next and think about where there food — meat or not — comes from, and to consider the ethical, environmental and healthy implications of that.

This is the last video in our series on eating (and not eating) animals. This was a series we ran to get ready for our event with Jonathan Safran Foer this Sunday, when he reads from and signs his new book Eating Animals. We hope you’ll join us for what will be a very interesting and lively discussion. Bonus! Jacket Copy interviews Jonathan Safran Foer. Also, check out his website, which has lots of useful information to help you avoid factory meat, should you decide to do so.

You may know Sherri Gallentine from her various guest posts on the Vroman’s Blog (many of them culinary in nature) or from seeing her around the store, but did you know that she raises chickens in her backyard in Altadena? I thought it would be enlightening to visit her backyard chicken farm and see how the birds lived. Of course, this meant we had to get them back into the coop at the end of the visit, too. That, I learned, is easier said than done. Watch and find out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more on Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, check out the website where you can find out more about the book as well as get tips on how to avoid factory meat, and much, much more. Jonathan Safran Foer will be at Vroman’s this Sunday, November 8, to discuss Eating Animals.

This Sunday, Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, will present his new book Eating Animals at Vroman’s Bookstore. Eating Animals is an exploration of how and why he became a vegetarian, and it investigates factory farming, modern slaughterhouses, industrial agriculture and much more. It’s a more personal take on something writers Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan have written about in their popular non-fiction titles of recent years.

All this week, we at the Vroman’s Blog are going to be examining our feelings and thoughts about eating animals. Each day we’ll post a little something from a staff member or a customer looking at how we feel about eating (or not eating) meat. The aim of this series of posts isn’t to preach or convert, but rather to explain our own positions and to open a dialog and learn from each other. If you have an opinion or a great story you’d like to tell, leave a comment. If you’re local and would like to talk on camera, stop by the store anytime before 5:30 p.m., ask for Patrick and I’ll put on the blog (You’ll be a star!).

Today’s video is about my weekly trip to the Farmers Market, something I have mixed feelings about. We hope you enjoy the video, and remember, more to come all week long.

Click here to view the embedded video.