How many books in your Kindle library can be shared with Amazon’s new lending program? So far, Macmillan and Scholastic seem to lead the field.

This GalleyCat editor did a quick search of his own Kindle library (pictured, click to enlarge), discovering that out of ten randomly chosen titles, only two books could be shared. Both sharable titles were published by Macmillan: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier.

Titles published by Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Pantheon, and Bellevue Literary Press can’t be shared at this time. We also checked Just Kids by Patti Smith, a HarperCollins title that can’t be shared. The complete list follows below, listing title, author, and the publisher behind the title.

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Welcome to GalleyCat’s annual pet parade, a holiday display of literary pets around the globe. GalleyCat readers have sent in pictures all week–the largest response we’ve ever received to the pet parade. Look for more pet pictures all week.

Author and book industry journalist Melissa Mia Hall submitted that photo of a literary pup: “When I need help with book reviews my dog Daisy is always eager to lend a paw.”

Follow this link to see more pet parade photos. More cute pictures follow below–click to enlarge the individual photos.

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Thirty writers and actors joined a marathon reading of the classic holiday tale, A Christmas Carol at New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore Cafe before the holidays. In an article about the event, Bookish compared the reading to a similar reading staged by Charles Dickens in 1867. Editor’s note: We’ve added some commentary from Housing Works Books below.

A trailer for an animated adaptation is embedded above. Here’s more from  Bookish: “Dickens was greeted with eager fans who waited for tickets overnight in the cold, wrapped in blankets and huddled around bonfires to keep warm. The cops were called in for crowd control. On the first night of his New York tour, a sold-out audience of more than 2,000 literary socialites and powerful businessmen gathered in the grand Steinway Hall by Central Park. They cried, laughed, and interrupted with applause during Dickens’ reading.”

According to the article, only about “a half-dozen” of the attendees stayed for the entire 3-hour reading. Literary enthusiasts aren’t what they used to be in the 19th century. Bah, humbug!

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In September, Jimi Hendrix‘s bookshelf and our Best Authors on Facebook directory were among our top headlines.

Instead of doing our traditional year-in-review post, we’ve decided to collect the ten most popular stories on GalleyCat each month–sharing the stories that mattered most to our readers. Looking back at these headlines, we can see the hopes, fears, and distractions that obsessed the publishing industry in 2010. Follow this link to see the rest of the year unfold.

1. Haruki Murakami Has 11/1 Odds to Win 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature
2. Emperor Franzen & Evil Wylie Unmasked
3. Worst Day-Jobs for Writers
4. Jimi Hendrix and His Science Fiction Bookshelf
5. Best Authors on Facebook
6. Defense Department Hopes to Buy 10,000 Copies of Operation Dark Heart
7. Tea Party Coloring Book for Children
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Trailer Released
9. Why the ‘Why?’ Behind a Lit Agent’s Rejections are Often Left Out
10. ‘All Joy and No Fun: The Parent’s Paradox’ Author Scores Book Deal

Denis Dutton, philosopher, author and founder of Arts and Letters Daily, passed away this week at 66-years-old.

The LA Times has a moving tribute to Dutton, a philosophy professor and author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. In the TED video embedded above, Dutton outlined his theory with the help of animator.

Here’s more about the video: “TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton’s provocative theory on beauty — that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply “in the eye of the beholder,” are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.”

In August, author Seth Godin rocked the publishing world when he announced he would no longer work with traditional publishers. That same month, we created a Women in Publishing Twitter directory and discovered a trailer for an upcoming Haruki Murakami adaptation.

Instead of doing our traditional year-in-review post, we’ve decided to collect the ten most popular stories on GalleyCat each month–sharing the stories that mattered most to our readers. Looking back at these headlines, we can see the hopes, fears, and distractions that obsessed the publishing industry in 2010. Follow this link to see the rest of the year unfold.

1. New York Times Bestseller Seth Godin to No Longer Publish Books Traditionally
2. Women in Publishing Twitter Directory
3. Rooney Mara to Star as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4. Haruki Murakami Adaptation: Norwegian Wood Trailer
5. The Worst Negative Book Review Clichés
6. Free Dating Site for Book Lovers
7. Simon & Schuster Publisher Reorganizes
8. Steampunk Sarah Palin
9. Artist Builds Rooms Out of Books
10. Mockingjay Embargo Broken in LA Times Review

When you picked “writer” as your career path, did your loved ones protest?

In the video embedded above, the comedy video production company smallGrand introduced the  Real World Writing Camp. The imaginary camp’s mission is to drown the hopes of teenage writers.

In the satirical video, participants visit Bushwick, Brooklyn–”home to the country’s largest concentration of unemployed MFA graduates.”  Teens are paired with a miserable writer to discourage their writing dreams. What do you think?

Mash-up experts Quirk Books will release The Meowmorphosis in May. The book will tackle Franz Kafka‘s classic about a man who wakes up as a giant bug. The hero of the The Metamorphosis mash-up will wake up as “an adorable kitten” instead.

If you want to read the unspoiled original, Project Gutenberg has a free eBook version. Quirk spawned a remixing trend with the bestseller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Disclosure: Last summer, Quirk Books shared prizes in our World’s Longest Literary Remix contest.

Jacket Copy has an excerpt from the catalog description: “But his life goes strangely wrong in the very first sentence of ‘The Meowmorphosis’, when he wakes up late for work and discovers that he has inexplicably became an adorable kitten. His family must admit that yes, their son is now OMG so cute — but what good is cute when there are bills to pay? How can Gregor be so selfish as to devote his attention to a ball of yarn?”

Last summer, veteran storyteller Michele Carlo published her memoir, Fish Out of Agua. We caught up with her to get some storytelling tips for all authors.

Q: What advice do you recommend for reading a story aloud and engaging an audience?
A: Connection and commitment. Connecting with both your story and the audience. And committing to your story, even if you are not getting the response you anticipated.

Q: What inspired you to write your memoir?
A: I had been telling stories at The Moth for a couple of years when people started asking me when I was going to write my stories down–and my answer was always ‘one day.’ Well, ‘one day’ in 2007 I decided that if I wanted my life to change, I had to change my life.

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Author Ricardo Cortes hopes to reprint  a hardcover edition of his controversial children’s book about marijuana through Kickstarter. Read more about his quest to publish It’s Just a Plant at the fundraising site.

Welcome to our Kickstarter Publishing Project of the Week, a feature exploring how authors and publishers are using the fundraising site to raise money for book projects. If you want to start your own project, check out How To Use Kickstarter to Fund Your Publishing Project.

Here’s more about the $9,000 project: “After being rejected by a dozen publishers, I decided to publish the book myself. It was a crash-course in an unfamiliar industry. Fortunately, the story struck a nerve, and began to gain national attention – both good and bad. Parents, teachers, congressmen, David Crosby, and Bill O’Reilly all had something to say about the story. You can see some of the press the book attracted here. Five years later, the book has become a minor children’s classic. It sold out a first edition (hardcover) and I’ve just sold out the second edition (paperback).”