This week, I sat down with Zachary and some of his favorite picture books.

These are beautiful books, Zachary. Can you tell me a little bit about them?

I want to see “Where the Wild Things Are.”

What is your favorite page in “Wild Things”?

When Max was chasing the dog with a fork.

Why is that your favorite?

Because, look. See, there he is! There’s the dog with the fork!

How do you think he feels?

Sad.

Who—Max, or the dog?

The music T-shirt: a badge of identity, a protest, a security blanket, overworn, overloved, destined to be stuffed into a dresser drawer and forgotten, come across years later and greeted somewhat sadly, a memento mori of a wilder, younger time.

Unless your mother throws all your music T-shirts away. Then the music T-shirt becomes your albatross, dooming you to a life spent trawling second-hand clothing stores and eBay. Such is the fate of Cesar Padilla, the owner of the vintage boutique Cherry, in the West Village. When he was growing up in California in the seventies and eighties, Padilla frequented rock shows on the Sunset Strip, and began building a music T-shirt collection. A trip to South America in 1988 ended in horror: he returned home to find that his mother had cleaned house. Since then, he writes at the beginning of “Ripped,” a book out this month from Universe, he’s been attempting to reassemble his “misspent California youth.”

“Ripped” comprises photographs of two hundred T-shirts from the post-punk period, “after the submission of 1960’s rock ‘n’ roll to mass popularity and before the onset of ironic consumerism.” Which is to say, the period of T-shirts that make you look extremely cool, from bands that were extremely cool. The Sex Pistols, The Fall, Holler Disco, The Runaways, Ike and Tina Turner, Cocaine Cowboys, The Shangri-Las, The Kinks, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag (to name a few). Some are glossed by cool people—Thurston Moore, Judy Nylon, Betsey Johnson—and Lydia Lunch (whose own T-shirts I’d totally wear to bed) wrote the introduction. For her, the music T-shirt aficionado in those days was someone who valued individuality: “You can’t buy style any more than you can fake a rebellion just by buying a ready-made carbon copy of what a million other clueless fools are wearing this season.”

• Van Fuckin’ Halen.
• Grace Jones.
• Buzzcocks.
• Sonic Youth.
• Sober Up, Bitch!

(All images copyrighted “Ripped: T-Shirts from the Underground,” by Cesar Padilla, Universe, 2010.)

If you are like me, and keep buying more books despite the precarious piles stacked next to your already filled bookshelf, then maybe you should try out BookMooch.com. It’s essentially a book-for-book barter system in which you get a point for sending someone a book, and you lose one point for each book you “mooch.” There are some other helpful stipulations: you earn three points for sending a book internationally and 1/10th of a point for leaving feedback for a swap well done. You can search for books by language, country of origin, and (more interestingly) most “wishlisted” and most available (”The Da Vinci Code” is a contender for that title, with four hundred and ninety-two copies up for mooching). It seems like an ingenious way to save money (and space!) for those of us looking to update our libraries. Do you participate? Leave a comment with your thoughts on the system.

A new release of “Finnegans Wake” will include 9,000 changes.

Tony Judt’s battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Ed Park explores the intersection between role-playing games and fiction.

Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is the composer for the film adaptation of “Norwegian Wood.”

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas is now home to the David Foster Wallace archives.

Does superstar translator Edith Grossman overlook the flourishing independent translation scene?

Byron Coley and Thurston Moore talk about poetry and books about the Velvet Underground.

A video of how a book cover is designed.

Lie back, relax, let the good doctors at the Book Bench analyze the contents of your bookshelf.

From Tony, Trumbull, Connecticut.

Tony, you’re going to want to be careful with those teetering piles—I had a similar thing going on at my desk last week, and when I pulled one book from the bottom, all Jenga-like, it caused a landslide that knocked over my iced coffee and utterly ruined my keyboard. I know what you’re thinking: iced coffee in March? In New York? Focus, Tony. The point is that while your system is aesthetically pleasing and features all the “right” authors—Updike, Agee, Chekhov, Keats, Capote, Orwell, and Roth, with a little Wells Tower thrown in—it does so at the expense of practicality and, furthermore, safety. Could the same be true of other aspects of your life? Do you worry about important things like accumulating a deeper understanding of the universe through literature while duller matters fall by the wayside? The light on your desk perfectly illuminates the spines of your books (and the photos of your loved ones), but what lurks in the shadows? I fear it may be the cable bill. Consider this a reminder that it’s due.

Want your shelf analyzed? E-mail a picture with your name and location.

You recall the story of the Ten Commandments: Mount Sinai is covered in a big black cloud of smoke because God has descended upon it in a literal blaze of glory. He calls to Moses to come up into the cloud, but to leave the Israelites behind, lest He “break forth” upon them and they all die. So Moses goes up to see God, and there are trumpets blaring and thunder crashing and lightning flashing, and God tells Moses the ten laws, and then he tells him many other laws, and all told Moses is up there with God for forty days and forty nights, all the while surrounded by this big black cloud. Then God gives him the tablets with the Commandments, and Moses carries them down and—doh!—sees the people worshipping a little golden cow, and smashes the tablets, because his “anger waxed hot.” So hot, in fact, that he makes them drink their precious cow, once he’s burnt it down and mixed the ash into some water. So the Israelites have been taught a lesson (or the beginning of one—they also get “plagued” after they finish drinking their cow-ash), but so has Moses, because now thanks to that terrible temper of his he has to go back up into the cloud to get two replacement tablets. So up he goes for another forty days and forty nights, and this time when he comes back down with the tablets, everyone knows it’s for real because the “skin of his face” is blindingly shiny, and no one can look at him unless he puts something over his head.

In other words, it was a big production. Like, stupid big. So I guess it makes sense that when Christopher Hitchens decided to come down from whatever mountain he’s been on to deliver his own Ten Commandments, he wouldn’t just film himself with his laptop camera and send it out over Chatroulette. No, he’d get a whole team of video producers at Vanity Fair to do it up right. A green screen has been employed, in front of which stands a serious Hitchens in a nice grey suit, just a touch of shine on his forehead. There are images, and elevator music, and text of what he’s saying helpfully scrawled in front of him. And even a cloud, though one not visible to the naked eye. Maybe there’s no mountain and no lightning and no trumpets and no stone tablets, but the transmission of knowledge in the digital age TOTALLY ROCKS—just like these dudes say it does. I mean, just try smashing Hitchens’s Commandments without smashing your computer. So push that bubble of hysteria rising in your throat down, put your headphones on, lie back in your chair, and (this is a commandment) enjoy the video.

Carolyn Kellogg has an interesting piece in the L.A. Times about the evolution of the book tour, from a publishing-house-backed fifteen-or-so-city tour in which the author reads, meets, and signs at bookstores to self-funded tours of a much smaller scope, where the author might find lodgings on couchsurfing.com. Kellogg cites two main factors: dwindling budgets (or, at least, shifting priorities) at publishing houses and the disappearance of bookstores across the country (so that even the biggest authors now find themselves at Costco). What does this mean for readers and writers? she asks:

If things continue on their current trajectory, book tours will become striated by class. Elite authors will go where they can reach big audiences, while others will have to work the angles to propel a trip on the road.

It’s a shame because, for all the hoopla surrounding the latest celebrity memoir, readers are rarely drawn to books by hype machines. We get turned on by trusted friends, by the local bookseller, by a reading, even by a newspaper review. “It was exciting to get a lot of different reviews in regional newspapers,” [Dan] Chaon says, “but it just doesn’t happen that much anymore.”

Technology can help, but it has limits. Reading an online Q&A with Walter Mosley isn’t the same as hearing him speak or waiting in line to shake his hand. If authors never get farther from home than they can travel in a day, they’ll have a hard time extending their reach; as readers, we’ll become increasingly provincial.

Some fervor for self-improvement was ignited last month by the announcement that online-dictionary-maker Wordnik was putting out an obviously named but elusively explained new product called Smartwords. The initial response was laudatory. CNET led with the tautological-sounding “Smartwords aims to make readers smarter,” promising that the new technology “could make you a whole lot more erudite.” Hurrah! But when we went to the Smartwords Web site, we didn’t feel so sanguine. “Are your words smart enough?” the header challenged. We thought perhaps not. How could they be improved? The company’s Web site described the product thus: “A lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words.” Huh? Those couldn’t have been the smartest words to describe it, because we still had no idea what it would do.

We attempted to dissect the articles for insight. So we found Wordnik C.E.O. Erin McKean telling reporters, “A lot of people say you can know what kind of person someone is by looking at their friends.” We had to pause there; as you can tell from the Book Bench’s newest feature, we believe you can know what kind of person someone is by looking at their shelves. But McKean went on: “In the same way that people can get a pretty good idea of a person’s demographic&#8212are they the kind of person that goes to Dunkin’ Donuts or to Starbucks&#8212you can say the same thing about words. Are you the kind of word that appears in (a popular entertainment) magazine or are you the kind of word that appears in The New Yorker?” Wait, that’s wordism! We don’t want Panglossian to ditch the neighborhood just because prehab is moving in. Can’t we all be friends?

Revisiting “Brideshead Revisited.”

Flavorpill chooses their favorite thirty opening lines in literature.

The experience of reading on a Kindle is a new kind of enjoyment.

Dave Eggers recounts his evolution from “staggering genius” to champion for the underprivileged.

Yelena S. Chizhova on travesties of Russia’s past.

What the titles of Harlequin novels reveal about our ideal partner.

According to David Shenk, we all have the potential to be geniuses.

A history of the book from Sumeria to Stefan Zweig.

Great images of books from around the world and the Web.

Mexico City’s imposing megabiblioteca.

“Vista de la Biblioteca Vasconcelos,” by Eneas de Troya.

Have you taken a photograph of books worth a thousand words? E-mail us with caption and credit information.