Zach - noted! Its funny you should mention that because it is at the top of my queue right now.

'Perfect' Timing
This article comes out today; I turn 30 tomorrow. Nothing makes me feel old quite so quickly as a bunch of my favorite writers talking about feeling old.

I too thought that the AV Club readership skewed older - I suspected that, being born in 1980, I was close to the median age, perhaps a little bit younger (what with all of the Smiths, R.E.M. and The Fall references) . But apparently not.

"You have selected regicide" is probably my favorite reference in all of the Simpsons.

The version of "Idioteque" off of the live album is one of the most-played songs in my iTunes. They really brought it to that show.

That middle stretch of Darkness On the Edge of Town - Candy's Room, Racing in the Street, and The Promised Land - is one of the best 10 minutes of music I've ever heard in my life, and yet none of them are ever played on the radop. Its a shame, because (at least to me) Born To Run gets tired after 20 or 25 listens.

Deep Cut Mix Tape
A couple of years ago I made a "Deep Cut Mix Tape" for a girl I was dating, and some other friends heard it when sheplayed it at a house party, and so I ended up making a lot of copies of it and passing it around. I've lost the track list, but it included:
The Rolling Stones - "Salt of the Earth"
Elton…

Workingman's Blues #2 is one of my favorite Dylan songs, too. But Sooner or Later (One of Us Must Know) is amazing - I got into Dylan as a sophomore in college and drove my roommates nuts listening to that album over and over again.

The Rolling Stones - "Salt of the Earth"
They played this song at the Concert for New York City, and everybody loved it, which made me wonder why it didn't get more attention in the first thirty years' of its existence. Just a great, catchy song.

Sounds good
I was glad to read about the satisfying conclusion - I've found that a lot of books that are first in a series spend so much time, as you said, laying down the rules and introducing characters that they forget to tell a story until you are already a few hundred pages into them. Sounds as if they author…

There was a great episode of Magnum P.I. that adapted The Most Dangerous Game. He had to use the skills he learned in the Vietnam War, etc.

Could anybody pull off Absalom, Absalom!? Would it be stupid to even try?

Neil Hamburger has about five minutes' worth of RHCP jokes. They're all corny, but the real joke is the over-arching meta-joke that, in the year 2010, a stand-up comedian has five minutes worth of jokes about the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I have to give Woody Allen a pass. What male director has created more real, three-dimensional female characters over the course of his career?

The XX.

Back on the base
The food that gets served at the base is typically pretty good. Out in the field, all bets are off.

We Bitched About It Constantly
I first read this book right after it came out in paperback; its melancholy tone and dark humor fit my general attitude about life and work at the time. Its tone reminded me of M*A*S*H in a lot of ways, and I mean that as a compliment, and think it was a real achievement to create…

Relatable Characters
I found Genevieve the most relatable - as someone said, she is a good person with kind tendencies who every once in a while gets sucked into the "we." I think that every big office has to have a Benny, or else it would be boring as hell.

The real-life Jim Halpert
Yours is the most favorable review of The Unnamed of the several that I've read. I think that Ferris' writing style is so great that his writing is interesting even if the subject matter is unoriginal - in fact, some of the best passages in Then We Came To The End describe the most mundane…

Fortress of Solitude and Then We Came to the End
Both of those novels are among my personal favorites. Then We Came to the End blew me away; I can't wait for next month's Wrapped Up in Books. Fortress of Solitude is a little bit different, and is an excellent novel, though in all honesty it probably benefits from…