Update

Slogging away at novel revisions in short frequent sittings.  Think I am still on track to finish for the 25th.  Ready for semester to be over!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising; Garth Nix's Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz; and an exceptionally charming self-published novel by a talented newcomer whose book I came across because I fell for his wife's triathlon training blog last year when she and I were both training for Ironman Coeur d'Alene.  (She successfully completed the race; alas, I didn't make it to the start due to a particularly bad bout of bronchitis.)  So, strongly recommended: M. H. Van Keuren's Rhubarb.  I think comparisons of a book in this sort of vein (aliens, paranormal radio, pie!) will inevitably be first of all to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker books; there's a little bit of the feel of the appealing TV series Supernatural; but really it's a very fresh and appealing novel in a mode I especially enjoy.

Bonus link:  crab computing!  (And more here.)

"Eyes too like the lobster's"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on Jenny Hartley's new one-volume selection of Dickens' letters:

He is often killingly funny, more so even than in the novels, as in his description of taking his son and friends out on a picnic from Eton; “What I suffered for fear those boys should get drunk – the struggles I underwent in a contest of feeling between hospitality and prudence – must ever remain untold . . . . They were very good, however. The speech of one became thick, and his eyes too like the lobster’s to be comfortable, but only temporarily”.

"A 'lobster trick' rewriteman"

This article has just introduced me to the phrase "the lobster shift."  Green's Dictionary of Slang gives a first usage from 1927 (of the variant "lobster trick") and suggests it derives from "the slow pace of the crustacean; i.e. such a shift, usu. between 2:00a.m. and 9:00a.m. is rarely busy."  It would make a great title for a novel...

"Let them see kitsch"

Koons at Versailles. More details here, and an attractive but unilluminating website. (Image courtesy of Getty.)