Link-O-Rama

At the Guardian, a Julith Jedamus's top 10 Japanese novels. I am sadly deficient in my reading on this score. I must work on that. Also, for Bloomsbury fans, The Letters of Lytton Strachey. I love reading Virginia Woolf's gossip about him in her diaries. I wonder if he gossips about her in his letters? A little rant at the NY Times about the proliferations of memoirs:

The memoir has been on the march for more than a decade now. Readers have long since gotten used to the idea that you do not have to be a statesman or a military commander - or, like Saint-Simon or Chateaubriand, a witness to great events - to commit your life to print. But the genre has become so inclusive that it's almost impossible to imagine which life experiences do not qualify as memoir material.

Apparently we are all constantly creating a narrative of our lives. That's okay by me, but why do so many people have to publish their narrative? Whatever happened to keeping a diary and keeping it private? Or just keeping it among your friends? The NY Public Library celebrates Don Quixote with a reading to include Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and others. I so wish I could go. (link via Maude Newton)