"It was a manly, manly skull": in the course of discussing the Yorick in Jude Law's Hamlet, the New Yorker's Book Bench blog points to another, far more touching case of head-fakery, written about in the magazine three years ago.

- Sameer Rahim greets the gathering a literary myth around Martin Amis. This is true, I think: some forms of gossip expand in retrospect, as additional significance is layered on. For another Amis example, compare his genially deflating account of his university experiences in the 1977 anthology My Oxford (a time of "no more Oxford 'generations'", in which he progresses from friendlessness to modest social and sexual success) to the presentation of the same basic facts in Experience, burnished by two decades of hindsight and with all the subsequently famous names added in.

- Bookninja suggests some helpful extra slogans for the "Bookaholism" reading promotion campaign.

- The Charing Cross Road blog Bookride discusses selling the far right second-hand; demand is depressingly solid, apparently.

- The full text of Dave Eggers's response to those needing to be bucked up about the fate of literature.

- Ed Champion considers the dilemmas of the to-be-read pile, showing off only a little about what's in his.

- The flap over what the author Sherman Alexie said, and meant, about the "elitist" Kindle - to which Champion contributed an enlightening interview - becomes even more intriguing when filtered through Amazon's own Omnivoracious blog.