I’ve run out of time to do a blogroll post this morning, so let me share a couple things before I install someone I love in a college.

Reading: In the U.K. Critic, Simon Evans writes about pretending to read books: “‘I am writing a book,’ says the man at the drinks party, in the old Peter Cook cartoon. ‘Neither am I,’ replies his companion. 

“Still makes me laugh. But would now work with ‘I am reading a book’, too.

“’The larger the island of knowledge,’ goes the old Reader’s Digest phrase, ‘the longer the shoreline of wonder.’ I used to find that thought reassuring, even awe-inspiring. It is now absolutely terrifying. That’s before you factor in the fractal nature of the coastline. When you get there, there is no ‘there’.”

I have never pretended to have read something I haven’t read, but plenty of times I have suggested, discussed, or recommended books on the scantest of knowledge about them, which is something entirely different.

Southern Literature: Warren Smith notes that Marion Montgomery and Flannery O’Connor were close friends for a few years and gave us “perhaps the greatest definition of Southern literature anyone has so far come up with, certainly one of the most quoted.”