Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

Slow News Day

• OPTR has the goods on how to check out the first five chapters of Murakami's latest, Kafka on the Shore.
• Carrie has done a fantastic job compiling the overlooked books of 2004.
• Less than a year after writing a steamy novel, Jimmy Carter has a slim memoir, Sharing Good Times, in the works. After the unexpected titilation found in The Hornet's Nest, the former President had initially planned to go off the deep end again, largely because Clinton's memoir was so plodding. But Carter persuaded to change the original title, Sharing High Times, and excise a lengthy chapter about the benefits of THC, a pleasure that has assisted him in his negotiations throughout the past ten years.
• Stuart Jeffries predicts 2005's bestsellers. He's hedged his bets on Pablo Tusset's The Best Thing That Can Happen to a Croissant and, like myself, is hoping that Martin Amis's new novel will live up to its name.
• The Times talks with Leslie Klinger about The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. "I bought 300 books from a collector $3,500 in 1976, and I've never looked back," he says. That kind of sociopathic obsession has us convinced that Klinger's the right man for the job.
• And it seems that anyone can sell a memoir, including ex-Justice Roy Moore. Moore, you may recall, was the crazed man who tried to set up the Ten Commandments in the Alabama courthouse. In So Help Me God (I wish I were making that title up), Moore described that night as "the completion of a lifelong mission to use his position as the state's highest judge to publicly acknowledge God." Well, it's nice to know that today's judicial system is dedicated to impartiality!