Lord Byron inspired Jim Holt at the London Review of Books blog to dig up this 1993 New York Times piece about author photos (“In short, author photos are awful. Is there something going on here beyond bad taste?”), and I’m glad he did. . . . Carolyn Kellogg interviews Marcel Theroux, the author of Far North, the National Book Award-nominated novel about a woman who might be the last living person in an arctic world until she finds “shocking evidence that life might be flourishing elsewhere.” (Theroux: “It’s only now that we feel like we’re living at a cutting edge, and we feel that life is naturally linked to progress. But there’s nothing natural about that, if you look at history.”) . . . Friend of this site Jim Hanas has combined the pleasures of publishing technology with the pleasures of music nostalgia by releasing a collection of stories as an e-book and calling it Cassingle. . . . Maud Newton continues to write smartly and movingly about her family, this time with a look at a 1977 newspaper article about her great-great aunt Maude. . . . Try this thought on for size: “[I]t doesn’t much matter what the sun is made of. Actually, it is about a billion billion billion tonnes of mostly hydrogen gas. But if you were to put a billion billion billion tonnes of microwave ovens in one place - or a billion billion billion tonnes of bananas – then you’d get something equally hot that looked pretty much like the sun.” . . . I’d be willing to bet Bookdwarf has read more books than you have this year. . . . A squirrel was called an aquerne once upon a time. That and more satisfying word geekery in an entertaining post at Like Fire.