• Danny, of BookCrossing.com, has gone missing.
• "I wasn't sure if this was my father talking or the ghost of Adolf Hitler": Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond is due out from ReganBooks this January.
• "Why would an esteemed, respectable literary novelist like Chabon want to sully his fancy-pants reputation with a mystery novel?" Have I mentioned before that I kinda hate Lev Grossman?
• Johnny Depp becomes a brunette Warhol (-cum-Vogue-editrix) in the trailer for Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The winner of the award, organized by the London-based Literary Review, is given an Oscar-style statuette and a bottle of champagne -- but only if he or she comes to the awards ceremony in person.

Organizers said Wolfe, who is based in New York, was the first writer in the 12-year history of the competition to decline his invitation.

What is he, some kind of prude or something?

LONDON (AFP) - The mysterious death of Britain's leading Sherlock Holmes expert appears to have been a bizarre suicide plot deliberately based on one of the cases tackled by the fictional detective himself, a report said.

And the report only gets stranger:

In March this year, the body of Lancelyn Green, a 50-year-old academic, was found at his home, asphyxiated with a shoelace. An inquest was unable to decide what had happened and recorded an open verdict.

However friends believe Lancelyn Green killed himself and deliberately tried to get an American academic rival, whom the paper did not name, framed for the murder.According to the report, Lancelyn Green had become bitterly depressed after learning that a collection of papers belonging to the creator of Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was to be broken up and sold at auction.

The expert had spent two decades trying to track down the archive so as to write a definitive biography of Conan Doyle, and decided to take his own life, also implicating the American he blamed for breaking up the collection.

He contacted fellow Holmes scholars to allege the archive had been stolen, told a journalist darkly that "something might happen to me" and then changed his usual telephone answer machine message to an American voice.

The Sunday Times said that friends believed Lancelyn Green based this on "The Problem of the Thor Bridge", one of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures.

In the story, the Victorian detective finds that a tycoon's wife who appeared to have been killed by the family governess had in fact committed suicide, while trying to implicate the woman.

This seemed the most likely explanation, said John Gibson, a friend of the dead academic.

(The saddest aspect of it all might be that Green could only stage a story starring Sherlock Holmes -- knowing full well that Holmes always solved his cases, and that his revenge, consequently, would be a failure.)

If you don't like catalogs, you've got two options; you can either avoid them, or read Cliff Notes versions of them, i.e. Bookmarks Magazine. But now there's another option, thanks to "Buzz Girl": a catalog-blurb blog that combines the "secondary source" vibe of Bookmarks with the testes-shrivelling enthusiasm of the marketing-oriented catalogs. "Coming in April 2005: Ya-Yas in Bloom by Rebecca Wells. Just when we were all suffering from Ya-Ya withdrawal symptoms, a new novel brings the incomparable sisterhood back!" But the pain of withdrawal, dear Buzz Girl, was only the pain of remembrance.

responding with incredulity to TNT's The Librarian:

Topping the complaints were the fact that a master's of library and information studies was not clearly among Flynn Carsen's (Noah Wyle) 22 degrees, that the library didn't have anyone inside using it and that librarians might be considered nerds and "know-it-alls," rather than knowledgeable and helpful.

"Sadly, the portrayal of libraries as hoarders of secret knowledge spoiled a great deal of the overall enjoyment for me," said Brandon Bensley of Greensboro, N.C., who gave the film one star.

From TIME Magazine's "Trump's Checklist: The Donald reveals his strategy for spreading cheer:"

I want to make sure my children know where I'm coming from, so I'll give them gift sets of three of my best sellers.

And I bet he didn't even have the decency to write the books himself.