Books of The Times: Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Smirk
353218
A. J. Jacobs is a specialist in dubious achievements. This memoir details his reality-show version of living by rules set forth in the Bible.
181377
Queue submissions being scarce, I suggest we all submit limericks for consideration.  Mod up your favorites.    I'm no poet, so I'll submit a favorite of my childhood:    There was a young woman named Bright,  Who traveled much faster than light    She set out one day  In a relative way    And returned on the previous night.    I'm afraid I don't remember the author.
409671
1. "Rise and Shine" by Anna Quindlen (Random House)
74940
Britain's biggest literary festival - a fortnight's worth of readings, signings, debates and discussions - brings huge numbers of visitors to the small, but perfectly formed for the bookish, town of Hay-on-Wye each year.  This year was the festival's 20th, offering some 400 opportunities to put a face and a voice to names on spines. Guardian photographer Martin Godwin has been busy around the site, and for those who missed the festival here are some of his portraits of the visiting luminaries meeting their public over the past fortnight.  For a sample of these authors' voices, visit our audio archive of readings and interviews from the daily Haycasts.
637702
This old mining town in the northeast of England used to be a grimy industrial wasteland. Now it's becoming a gleaming cultural center and -- who would have thought it? -- tourist destination
495317
Michael Palin turns his wandering eye to the life and locales of Ernest Hemingway, moving between past and present in the places that meant so much to the author.
556101
Michael Cox's book has the ornate, curlicued linguistic niceties of a Dickensian period piece.
132583
1. "The Quickie" by James Patterson, Michael Ledwidge (Little, Brown and Company)
134778
Jane Smileyâs new novel is a Hollywood satire modeled loosely on Boccaccioâs âDecameron.â
512639
"Pegasus Descending" (Simon &amp; Schuster, 356 pages, $26) &#151; James Lee Burke
62529
Many years ago I was walking in a picturesque German town in Bavaria - flowers in window boxes, old steepled roofs, the kind of place you expect artist Thomas Kincaid to put on a calendar.
411268
"High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed" (Hyperion Books. 357 pages. $24.95), by Michael Kodas: If you're going to Mt. Everest, don't forget to pack a gun.
728904
Arts & entertainment: Guardian Books poll into era-defining books finds that paranoia, propaganda and a state of perpetual war are the defining characteristics of the last century.
763408
Comment is free: Tristram Hunt: The chasm between rich and poor seen in London today resembles the Manchester that Engels described in the 1840s.
210366
Will Self, the author of ÂThe Book of Dave,Â is partial to epic hikes, so the walk from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan, about 20 miles, was a mere stroll.
197411
"Tree of Smoke" (Farrar, Straus &amp; Giroux, 624 pages. $27.00), by Denis Johnson: Who needs another book about the Vietnam War this late in the game, with so many other national scars to pick at since then?
662592
"Oystercatchers" (W. W. Norton &amp; Company. 306 pages. $23.95 hardcover), by Susan Fletcher: In a follow-up to the award-winning "Eve Green," author Susan Fletcher creates a character who is not always likable and so introverted that it takes the reader time &#151; and many pages &#151; to get to know her.