morning reading

Good books are not conducive to a proper amout of sleep. Do you hear me, Craig Thompson? I was going to go to bed at a reasonable hour, but then I picked up Blankets and seeing as I was about three-quarters of the way through ... I just kept reading.

And then I couldn't sleep. It's a truly beautiful, heartbreaking, sad, lovely, hopeful book, and it strikes me as an intensely brave work of art, too. Just gorgeous. I also adore Thompson's earlier book, Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, which is one of those things that calls up a very specific memory for me: Sprawling on a blanket in a patch of spring sun in New York's Tompkins Square Park with a pile of comics my friend Toby had lent me. I also read Queen and Country: Operation Broken Ground that day, if memory serves, but it was the story of Chunky Rice, a turtle, and his best friend Dandel that had me sniffling and smiling at the same time. Thompson has a remarkable (though that word is too mellow) knack for the melancholy, the kind of story where change is inevitable, even necessary, but no less painful for that.

But now it's morning, and my coffee cup is empty, and that must mean I've found some interesting reading online, right? Well, sorta. Just a couple of things, really.

• First, something droolworthy: root beer float cupcakes. The same site has recipes for things like pear and bleu cheese cupcakes, which also, not-so-oddly, appeal to me.

• And droolworthy in another way is this set of images from and commentary on the original Oz books at BiblioOdyssey. The site also links to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz online at the Library of Congress, but I'm not clicking on that because, well, I need to do some work today. If only books were still this stunning.

• The Village Voice explores Rudy Giuliani's Five Big Lies about 9/11. I'm sticking this link here despite having not yet read the story, because I think the topic is important (and thus you should read it) and because I want to sit down and read it carefully and in-depth (and thus I don't want to forget about it).

• You realize Stardust opens today, right? And that you should go see it? Walk away from Daddy Day Camp! Don't be tempted by Rush Hour 3!

• If you need more Harry Potter in your life (and honestly, I still do), here are Christopher Hitchens' and Stephen King's takes on the end of the tale. (I confess, I usually can't bear King's Entertainment Weekly column, but I'll give this one a read.)

And with that, dear readers, my need for caffeine has begun to outweigh my love for browsing for more links. These are still pretty ordindary links, from pretty ordinary sources, and I realize that; I've got to get in the swing of things and start finding some funky stuff. Feel free to send in suggestions!

(Also, when I've had more coffee? Links get more commentary.)

Yawwwwwn ... OK, time for more coffee. But first! A few interesting things crossed my Safari tabs this morning as a result of the usual roundup of blogs (apologies to those via whom I found these sites but then didn't credit - I lost track of my tabs. Bad Molly, no cookie! Except for the cookies sitting at our reception area and calling my name, anyway):

• At The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer discusses "the hedonists inside our head" that urge people to do pleasure-now, pain-later things like sign up for sub-prime mortgages (don't worry; I didn't know what one of those was either, and the article was still interesting). (Via the usual: BoingBoing.)

• On Slashdot, herejackback pulls together a summary of the current fracas going on over at LiveJournal (one of my favorite sites for reading various RSS feeds, but boy, do they have issues). I hesitate to make an attempt at summarizing this one — it's massive and sprawling and getting bigger by the day — but there's a great icon floating about LJ as a direct result of this debate: "LiveJournal: Some terms of service are more equal than others."

• The Frugalist offers 147 Tiny Tips to Live Healthier, Happier, Greener and Better. Well, they offered this back in May, but I just found it and it's always relevant, right?

• Did we mention we have this ballot thing going on? You might have heard of it; it's called Best of Eugene? It's a readers' poll? And WE LIKE IT WHEN YOU VOTE. Once, I mean. Just once. We don't like it when you vote more than once. It's kind of a pain.