In the meantime, I have a favor to ask: If you’re from Houston or you’ve spent more than, say, a layover there, please email me (or comment here) with your favorite places to go, eat, see, and stay there. I’m writing a book about my hometown for Globe Pequot Press’ Insiders’ Guide series, and I want to make sure that the suggested restaurants, hotels, parks, shops, clubs are as eclectic as possible.

If you’ve got your own great rejection letters to share – and really, who among us doesn’t?! – you can find instructions for submitting them to Shapiro in this press release.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanks for taking the time to read it!

Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London and administer of the Orwell Writing Prize, think so. Seaton came up with the idea to create a blog of Orwell’s diaries. Each blog entry is published on the day Orwell wrote it … decades later. So, for instance, today’s Marrakech post, was written on September 14, 1938.

It feels a little weird to read Orwell on anything but paper, but I do like the idea of reading his diaries in serial. It feels slightly more authentic (or something like that) to read the “new” entries one at a time, rather several at a time, as I’d be inclined to do if I picked up a hard copy of Orwell’s diaries.

“What Book Got You Hooked?”

This is the question I just tried to answer for First Book, a nonprofit organization that donates books to children in need. I started to say Freckle Juice by Judy Blume because, well, what’s not to love about Judy Blume?

But is that really the book that got me hooked? Upon thinking about it, I wasn’t so sure. I could hear my mother saying, “One smiley lion …” So I knew I had to list Mary Bob Baker’s Smiley Lion Counting Book. After all, I apparently made my mom read this book to me over and over and over, which probably qualifies it as the book that got me hooked on reading. Or rather, being read to.

So what book got you hooked? Until September 15, First Book is asking readers to vote for the book that made them love reading—and select the state to which the organization will donate 50,000 “first” books to children in need. Right now, Kentucky’s gettin’ lucky and leading the way, so if you think another state’s kids should get those books, be sure to vote!

I suppose the theory is that we won’t have to celebrate it afterward because there will be no more illiteracy by then? A nice idea, sure, but I have a hunch we should keep scheduling this “holiday” indefinitely.

(Incidentally, I learned of International Literacy Day only because someone on Twitter wrote, “Happy Illiteracy!” That, of course, caught my eye because illiteracy is nothing to celebrate. The writer was probably making a joke, but when I Googled “International Illiteracy Day,” it seems that a few organizations elsewhere in the world actually do refer to September 8 as such. This makes me wonder: Is this just a translation issue? Or do non-Western countries have a different perception of literacy and illiteracy?

This is what I heard a woman say as she sat on her porch talking to friends (or family), a fully dressed Mannequin sitting nearby. For reasons I can’t explain, it made me laugh. Probably because I heard it outside of its original context.