Can we just say that we're 100 pages into Anna Karenina, and now we're FINALLY fully able to vet Janet Malcolm's joke about Gossip Girl's Nate Archibald, who she describes as "a kind of Vronsky manqué, with a grande-dame mother, like Vronsky's, and a Navy-captain father who is 'a master sailor and extremely handsome, but a little lacking in the hugs department."

From the inbox:

Dear friends of 826 Boston:

First, we apologize for being out of touch. We've been very busy this spring putting together all the nuts and bolts of the organization. We cannot wait to open our doors to the Boston community this summer and meet all of you!

Expect a more detailed newsletter soon, as well as the launch of our new and improved 826 Boston website, but for now, a brief update:

Word Up had a bit of trouble coming up with a favorites list for 2006. As much as we love us some literature up in this blog piece, it's not as though we're only consuming new, contemporary fiction. There's always new-to-us classics to discover, not to mention long-published tomes that have been on our must-read lists for months.

A few things to note:

1. It's officially December, which means the 2006 National Novel Writing Month bonanza is dunzo. And we'd like to know: did any of you participate? Does anyone get something worthwhile out of this thing? Is it just bullshit pressure to pump out drivel for 30 days? Or is it a magical literary bender of creativity? Discuss.

Hey hi, did you miss us? The internerd at Phoenix HQ was all crazy and unreliable through the end of last week. Thank Christ the www is just a series of tubes. Rest easy, everything's fixed now. Here's an interesting bit from the inbox:

Via Publisher's Marketplace:

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal looked at books that come with soundtracks--sometimes formally packaged with the book, sometimes informally posted on the web.

There are two issues in the news that I will be fussing over all day today. The first is the conflict in the Middle East, and obviously, I'm both disturbed and obsessed with that. Second is the fact that a certain Ms. Avril Lavigne has gotten hitched with her one and only Sk8tr Boi, Deryck Whibley of the pop-punk band Sum 41.

This month Topic magazine dedicates their 9th issue to Music. Sufjan Stevens, every indie-yuppie’s (and blogger's) favorite nü-folk multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter, has contributed the lead essay. And you know what? It’s really, really fucking good. Obviously Suf is a scribe; lyrically, his songs are lovelier and more publishable than a book of Jewel poems.

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who is regularly disturbed by the New York Times' Modern Love essays. This week, Theodora Stites takes us into the bone-chilling world of the online social networking scene. Way to pick up on the trend stories. People keep in touch via the Web?!!

Stites spends most of her word count here bragging about the many online communities to which she belongs--it's an exhausting laundry-list, and I'm wondering whether she's at all embarrassed by the amount of thought she puts into not only maintaining her personal pages, but her shameless admission that she'd rather experience a well-connected fake life on a machine than in reality.