Serialized novels are a rarity these days, but The Guardian books blogger David Barnett argues that they are making a comeback.

The Daily Mail has often run seasonal crime stories penned by the likes of Colin Dexter or R.D. Wingfield, featuring their popular characters Morse and Frost, and The Guardian has its four-handed weekly serial 52 in the Saturday Review section, penned on alternate weeks by Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, A.M. Homes and Jackie Kay. Michael Chabon’s latest novel Gentlemen of the Road began life as “Jews With Swords,” published in serial format in the New York Times, while Alexander McCall Smith announced in September that he was beginning a serial novel for the Telegraph, Corduroy Mansions, following up his five-year experiment with the form with 44 Scotland Street, which the Scotsman ran every weekday for six months of the year.

We would be remiss if we didn’t add Edmonton author Todd Babiak to that list. His last two novels – The Garneau Block and The Book of Stanley – were originally serialized in The Edmonton Journal.

In December, Michaelangelo: La Dotta Mano will be on display at the New York Public Library. The book in question weighs 61 pounds and is 18 x 28 inches. From The Los Angeles Times:

“La Dotta Mano” (translated as “the learned hand”) includes reproductions of drawings by Michelangelo, original photographs by Italian photographer Aurelio Amendola and writing by several Italian scholars, including Giorgio Vasari, Antonio Paolucci and Pina Ragonieri.

The whole thing is a project of Italian publisher FMR to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Michelango’s beginning work on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

Apparently, the book’s cover features an exact replica of the Madonna della Scala, carved from the same Polvacio quarries Michaelangelo used in his work. There will be 99 copies printed, each for $130,000 — with a few Giller wins, you won’t even need to put it on layaway.

Some Halloween-themed lit links:

• The top 10 ghost stories of all time (The Guardian)
• An interview with Stephen King on the 30th anniversary of The Stand (Salon)
• Book critic Laura Miller on why girls dig vampires (The Washington Post)
• Penguin’s “Red Classics” series of horror titles (The Globe and Mail)
• Literary Halloween costumes (The New Yorker)
• Christopher Walken reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (YouTube)

After a six-year run, the New York Sun is shutting down. From the New York Times:

The Sun’s president and editor, Seth Lipsky, said a three-week search for new financial backers had failed. Mr. Lipsky announced on Sept. 4, in a front-page “Letter From the Editor,” that the Sun would shut down by the end of the month unless it raised new money.

As he spoke, the stock market was diving toward the largest one-day point loss in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. “Among other problems that we faced,” he said, “was the fact that this month, not to mention this week, has been one of the worst in a century in which to be trying to raise capital, and in the end we were out not only of money but time.”

The Sun will close after publishing today’s issue. Lipsky started publishing the Sun with $15.9-million he raised from several backers, one of whom was Conrad Black – though Black’s company Hollinger International sold their stake in the Sun after Black quit Hollinger in 2003.

From the Times:

It may appear agrestic to ask, but The Times is calling on its readers to come to the rescue of words that risk fading into caliginosity.

Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.

The Times-owned Collins has agreed to keep some endangered words, should they show an increase in popularity before February (when the list is finalized). The list of 24 endangered words also includes vilipend and oppugnant. Stephen Fry is backing fubsy, while this Quillblogger is partial to nitid and malison.

• The shortlist for the Dylan Thomas Prize has been announced, and six young writers are in line to win the £60,000 (approximately $114,000 CAD) prize. The global award, given biennially, was established to promote writing among young people.

• The Independent hits the streets to see what Brits are reading.

• A Montana judge has sentenced 74-year-old James Brubaker to 30 months in jail for stealing books and documents from over 100 U.S. and Alberta libraries. Brubaker hit the University of Calgary, and some of his booty included “an eight volume facsimile recreation of the original journals of the Lewis and Clark voyages worth more than $2,000.”

One reason to look forward to the rise of e-books is that we’ll no longer have to worry about leaving books behind on the streetcar or in hotel rooms. On the other hand, we’ll no longer have the pleasure of randomly happening upon a lost book, either.

The Guardian looks at the phenomena of lost and found books in this post about the most popular books left behind in Travelodges.

Meanwhile, the Leader-Post looks at the Regina Public Library’s 100th anniversary celebrations, which saw staff leaving 100 new books in various public spaces about the city, in the hopes that people will discover them and pass them on.

There’s an internet debate a’brewin’ over the merits of that perennial high school syllabus placeholder The Catcher in the Rye. Over at Good Magazine, Anne Trubek makes an impassioned plea to replace it with something newer and fresher:

J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

Meanwhile, the scribes at Gawker have responded with an equally impassioned WTF? directed at Trubek:

My initial reaction to this would be that we read Catcher in The Rye because everyone on some level at some point loves Catcher in The Rye, and we are fast running out of things we can say that about.

Colleagues (and buddies) Stephen Clare and Trevor Adams of Halifax Magazine are looking to find the top 100 Atlantic Canadian books ever written. They plan to compile their findings in a book called Spindrift, but first they need your help.

By way of methodology, we are polling over 1,500 writers, readers, and literary people of all sorts across the country to submit their “Top 10″ list of fiction/non-fiction works from the East Coast.

So please, share your favourites with us. Feel free to include comments on the books you choose and why they’re important to you.

The only criterion is that the author(s) be from Atlantic Canada and/or lived in the region for a significant period during their writing careers.

Clare and Adams are both youngish fellows who write about “trends” and “culture” for the “increasing cosmopolitan population” in Atlantic Canada’s largest city. All the same, it’ll be interesting to see how many stories about crusty fishermen and remote villages end up in their ambitious book. The editors are asking readers to send their choices to bookpoll@gmail.com.

The next time someone tries to tell you that movies are a more visceral, exciting medium than literature, you can counter their arguments by pointing to a new scientific study that has just been released in the Netherlands.

According to Science Daily, three scientists at the University of Groningen decided to compare what happens in our brains when we view the facial expressions of other people with what happens in our brains when we read about emotional experiences. The scientist they quote, Christian Keysers, sounds like a very intense fellow, and we like to imagine that he looks and sounds something like the German filmmaker Werner Herzog:

“We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short [...] movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted,” said Christian Keysers. “Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner.”

“Our striking result,” said Keysers, “is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda.”

Prof. Keysers continued, “What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted – and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through.”