If you’re feeling out of touch with contemporary authors – here’s a shortcut I found while clicking through The Millions today. A stellar post by Max Magee calculates (by the number of prizes awarded) the most celebrated novels of the last 15 years. The top five are as follows:

1. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
3. Underworld by Don DeLillo
4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
5. The March by E.L. Doctorow

The full list is here.

While on the same website I also stumbled across a link to a Washington Post story in which the paper had asked 12 well known authors to tell them which book character they would like to accompany them for a day on the beach. My fave was Christopher Buckley, who answered:

“Well, I’m seriously tempted to say Lolita, but as Nixon would say, “That would be wrong.” The second-most obvious answer would be Robinson Crusoe, mainly so he’d do all the heavy lifting and making fires and getting the fresh water and – important – catching fish for supper. But the conversation might get boring after awhile, so I think I’ll go with Magwitch, the escaped convict from Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” He’d have some fantastic stories to tell, and, as we know, he knew his way around the seashore.”

At the New York Review of Books Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,) reflects on how the “Wilderness of Childhood” has changed and how the current state of heavily monitored play and discovery will impact fiction and adventure writing of the future (excellent).

A post about “artifacts, ephemera, pretty things, kitschy things, oddball objects with stories attached” over at Bookninja reminded me that I wanted to read Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. (rumoured to be made in to a movie staring Natalie Portman and Brad Pitt). Check out a YouTube explanation of the premise of the book above.

The ever-ambitious HBO is reported to have optioned Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex.

The Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail features a review (by Hal Niedzviecki) of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. The piece begins: “Free? Don’t make me laugh. It may seem that Google and the other ‘free’ services available on the internet are good things, but there is always a price to pay.” The piece goes on to unravel the concept of free to it’s money making core. Definitely worth a perusal. If you don’t have last weekend’s paper kicking around, you can read it online here.

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Michelle Sproule grew up in Kitsilano and attended Bond University in Australia and the University of Victoria before receiving her graduate degree in Library Sciences from The University of Toronto. She lives by the beach in Vancouver and enjoys wandering aimlessly through the city’s shops and streets with her best friend – a beat up, sticky, grimy, and uncooperative camera.

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