A few links for your afternoon:

• Totally agree with a lot of these book turn-offs, especially number eight.
• William Faulkner is still a master of words.
• The New York Public Library shares its list of the top 100 books of the last 100 years. No “best of” list can ever be complete, but this one does include a lot of favorites.
• Writing in bed, cars, and other unlikely locations.
• I never read Go Ask Alice, but this post about discovering it wasn’t real reminds me about discovering there’s no unabridged version of The Princess Bride.
• Meg Rosoff on why children deserve the truth, even when it’s hard.
• Songs for Punctuation Day, or whenever you want to celebrate the Oxford comma, aka always.
• Characters you love to hate.
• Messed-up families in literature can make your own look pretty good.
• Probably not surprising to educators and librarians, but now there’s evidence: students that read for pleasure do better than their peers.
• “Book banning isn’t about quality control; it’s about thought control.”