It’s the missing episode 76! Where have you been, young lady? Your father and I were sick with worry.

We mention:

• The National Book Awards
• The Giller Prize
• Laura Miller at Salon, on book awards
• Who the Hell is Arcade Fire?
• It was the New York Times: when book awards tried to go mainstream.
• More Laura Miller: can we even agree what makes great literature?
• Amazon’s Best Books of 2011. (In other news: 2011 – still not over at the time of this posting.)
• Keith Gessen’s Vanity Fair article on Chad Harbach
• I meant Shoeless Joe. I called it The Field of Dreams because who’s not more familiar with the movie version. I added the “The” because that’s what all the cool kids are doing. The Rock. The God Damn Batman. Everybody.
• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. (For the briefest of moments I thought the personal appeal from Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris was Thomas Mann’s author photo. Dissonant!)
• David Lodge
• A Separate Peace
• Paul Quarrington
• Our discussion of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
• Evelyn Waugh
• Jason Kottke loves Gordon Korman’s Bruno and Boots. So should you.