Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a delectable Friday, which means, aside from tonight’s unchronicled evening efforts of certain literary types who actually attempt to read a book while swinging back the shots (a multitasking enterprise that I am both incapable of and in awe of), this week’s final morning installment of the patented morning roundup. To wit:

1. That the continued ascent of one Helen Oyeyemi, a mere twenty-one years old, continues unabated.
2. That, despite quibbles from certain rakes, it would be incontrevertible to deny that this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner, with its inestimable contribution of the “carburetor breast” fantasy, is amusing, albeit puerile. (The winner was a Microsoft analyst from Fargo, no less!)
3. That we kept up a moment of silence for actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, who we enjoyed most throughly in Wuthering Heights and The Pawnbroker and who lived a long life.
4. That Kem Parton, a railroad worker-turned novelist was given cavil and calamity by his boss when he published a novel about the railroad, including terrorist elements. To the railroad itself: for shame.
5. That Betsy Burton (chronicled in our Books by the Bay report has been chronicled, along with other bookseller-related books, in Newsday.
6. That The Da Vinci Code did not win a recent UK book popularity contest and that literary Britons preferred books set in exotic locales.

The literary news junkie can make of these headlines or bypass this advocate’s occasional editorializing as s/he sees fit. But let it not be said that this advocate did not fulfill his morning constitutional.

Thank you and good morning.