How penguins kept John Ruskin sane. (That's stuffed, not paperback, obviously.)

• Jonathan Lethem on JG Ballard. (Bookninja saw it first).

• Good reviews that put you off a book are common enough – and, some authors sometimes suspect, deliberate. A bad review that makes you want to buy, on the other hand ...

• Philadelphia threatened with library apocalypse.

• Scott Pack on a poet and a cleaner.

• Practical methods of reading A Suitable Boy (not for the bibliophilically squeamish). James Fenton is reputed to have done something similar while reading Les Miserables on a trip down the Amazon, discarding fascicles as he went.