The ash-heap of history

At the Atlantic, James Parker on the decade's top ten pop culture moments.

Miscellaneous light reading round-up (I may be leaving out a few): Carol O'Connell, Bone by Bone (why do I like this woman's books so much? They are full of the most obvious writing flaws, page by page they are incredibly irritating to me - and yet they are still better than almost anything that's out there); Aifric Campbell, The Semantics of Murder (very good); John Connolly, Every Dead Thing (maddening in its jumping back and forth between stories, but ultimately really quite good despite implausibly huge number of serial-killered dead bodies - I will read the subsequent installments in the series for sure); random thriller-built-on-romance-chassis whose name I cannot remember; Morag Joss, Fruitful Bodies. Am now rereading Lee Child's The Killing Floor.