Some bookish links from around the web:

• Four of Martin Luther King’s most influential works are coming back into print
• An “urban fantasy” guide for Buffy fans
• Doctorow on Pilgrim
• Sunday marked the first day of the “Infinite Summer,” a literary challenge to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the 92 days of the summer. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat?
• Sci-fi author gets unprecedented 10-book deal worth £1-million.
• Genre fiction vs. literary fiction: Are the lines beginning to blur?

Some book-related links:

• “French” author Milan Kundera skips Czech conference on his work.
• Alain de Botton calls for a new literature of the workplace.
• Jonathan Goldstein discovers the lonely, Twilight Zone-esque hell of the signing table.
• Some essential beach reads that don’t exist.
• Happy birthday, Allen Ginsberg.

• A GTA gallery is about to launch an exhibit in which books are transformed and incorporated into art.
• As the new Watchmen movie starts getting some not-so-great reviews, Canadian graphica expert Jeet Heer schools New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. (Not that Heer’s a fan of the book or anything.)
• Following the announcement of Canadian Heritage funding policy changes that could be disastrous for litmags, the advocacy continues.
• Surprise, surprise: another Dan Brown movie adaptation is about to come out, and a Catholic group don’t like it. (Love the “Galileo asked for it” aside. Nice.)

• The mythology of Roberto Bolaño’s hard-knock life is starting to crumble: his widow says he was never a heroin addict, and others say he was not in Chile during the Pinochet coup.
• Slate takes a quick look around at the state of the book business.
• Russell Smith offers some reading recommendations.
• BookNet Canada asks: are e-readers’ claims to a greater greenness overstated?
• Stephenie Meyer still hasn’t gone back to that novel that got leaked; she’s now working on something else.

• The Guardian has created a list of 1000 novels everyone must read, broken down into categories like comedy, crime, family and self, and state of the nation. In considering the list, Stuart Walton wonders whether or not he will lose the will to read.
• A Japanese group is campaigning to use “toilet poems” in bathroom cubicles to decrease toilet paper usage in Japan.
• To: President Obama. From: McSweeney’s, and the kids of the U.S. — Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country

• Taken from Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses, test your knowledge of the final words of former presidents’ inaugural speeches (Jacket Copy)
• Barack Obama will take the oath of office on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used, and will eat a meal modelled on some of Lincoln’s favourite dishes (including the apple-cinnamon sponge cake). For The Book Bench, Adam Gopnick and Jill Lepore recommend some Lincoln books (The New Yorker)
• Martin Levin dissects Obama’s reading list (The Globe and Mail)
• Evangelist Rick Warren (and author of The Purpose Driven Life) delivers the invocation at Obama’s inauguration (abc6.com)
• Q&A with inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander (TIME Magazine)

• The Edmonton Journal has still more reaction to that poll revealing the anonymity of Canadian authors.
• Look out, Ulysses S. Grant – George W. Bush plans to write a book. Suggested title: Mission Accomplished.
• Asterix co-creator’s daughter bemoans “the worst enemies of Asterix, the men of finance and industry.”
• Bloomsbury doing OK, even post-Potter.

• Winnie the Pooh is back, 80 years after his first published appearance, in the first authorized sequel to A.A. Milne’s 1920s collection Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. (CBC.ca)
• George W. Bush is planning to write a book - something about the toughest decisions he had to make as president - and says though he doesn’t know how long it will take him to write it, he’ll be able to “get ‘er done.” (The Guardian)
• Another comeback, this time from Chris Rock, who’s scored a deal with Grand Central Publishing to write a book of “comedic observations.” (His last book was 1997’s Rock This!). Perhaps a collaboration with the above? (CTV.ca)
• The shortlist for the Romantic Novel of the Year award has been revealed - read it and weep. Literally. (The Guardian)
• A new media start-up called The Printed Blog is publishing free newspapers twice-daily in cities across the U.S., collecting the best local blog posts for those cities. Printed news and information - what a novel concept! (Wired.com)

Sundry links from the Web:

• More wreckage at Random House U.S.: Pantheon Books publisher Janice Goldklang is laid off after 25 years with the company.
• How well do you know crime fiction? Take the Ceeb’s online quiz to find out.
• You know that heart-wrenching YouTube video, the one where two shaggy-haired hippies are reunited with their long-lost pet lion? Apparently, their story was recorded in a 1972 non-fiction book called A Lion Called Christian, now the sixth most requested out-of-print book on Bookfinder.com.
• They say that American pop culture is always more inventive when a Republican is in office. Now, The Independent asks whether the credit crunch has a silver lining for literature.
• If 2008 was the year of Roberto Bolaño, will 2009 be the year of Richard Yates?
• Richard Price threatens to bare his ass.

• Canada’s Sun Media is cutting 600 jobs in Ontario, Quebec, Western Canada — about 10 percent of the workforce (CBCnews.ca)
• Amazon U.K. employees are being forced to work seven days a week; they are given penalty points for taking sick days, and face dismissal after accumulating six penalty points (the U.K. Times)
• The total number of layoffs since Nov. 1, 2008, at America’s 500 largest public companies is 178,961, according to the Forbes Layoff Tracker (Forbes.com)