Portland author Phillip Hoose has been nominated for a National Book Award for Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The book, which tells the story of a young civil-rights heroine, is nominated in the Young People's Literature category, where it's up against just four others (more than 250 were submitted for consideration).

Congrats, Phil!

Got a book in the mail: Wicked Maine Limericks, it's called. Published last month by Maine Line Press, the slim volume contains about 50 pages of limericks (five lines, AABBA form, a la "There once was a man from Nantucket," etc.) written by and about Maine and its people.

According to the "Curator's Note" written by UMaine professor and Bangor resident Henry Garfield, the project was conceived when August Pomerleau, acting interim director of the Pine Tree Foundation for the Preservation of Fine Poetry, asked Garfield to generate, select, and edit new limericks from new poets in an effort "to save the rapidly dissappearing Maine Limerick from extinction."

So, apparently recovering from bird flu makes me an insomniac. Awesome!! Around 3 a.m., I pulled out my Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (hey, if you're going to be miserable, might as well go all the way, right?) After reading some uterus/madness/Freudian shit for a while, I decided to (re?) read the intro by editors Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George.

Maine's latest literary success story, Lew Robinson (Alex Irvine reviewed Robinson's Water Dogs for the Phoenix last week, right after the New York Times did so), is publishing a serialized story, "The Choral and Harpist Arts Society," at FiveChapters.com, a Web site that publishes stories in five parts -- one on every day of the week.

Self-described "crap speller" David Wolman sets out in a literary-historical-travelogue across the English-speaking world to discover who, exactly, made the rules that have tormented him since primary school, and why.

As it turns out - and, I suppose, as should have been obvious - liveblogging a book doesn't make much of any sense. Especially one as intertwined and nuanced as 2666. I'm still at a relative loss to summarize it, let alone analyze it. Left thinking about: the five sections, all somewhat distinctive stylistically, that just end; how we learn everything about the life and nothing about the work of the fictional author that motivates much of this tale; the characters all searching for clues - to the whereabouts of a lost writer, to the murderer(s) of hundreds of young women in northern Mexico, to their sexual and romantic needs and desires, to how to escape squalor and grief, to the importance of identity, to the symbolism of their dreams - which, in many cases, they find and lead to nothing.