Wil Wheaton alert - he has a new book due out this Spring from Subterranean Press. The Happiest Days of Our Lives sounds like a sweetheart:

Readers of Wil Wheaton’s website know that he is a masterful teller of elegant stories about his life. Building on the critical success of Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek, he has collected more of his own favorite stories in his third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. These are the stories Wil loves to tell, because they are the closest to his heart: stories about being a huge geek, passing his geeky hobbies and values along to his own children, and vividly painting what it meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of the video game/D&D/BBS/Star Wars figures generation.

That guy totally had my childhood; I love him.

A couple of weeks ago Curious Expeditions looked at the collections of Willie K. Vanderbilt II, who I somehow never heard of. The guy was my sort of rich playboy:

Willie K. was a curious man and he traveled the globe on his massive yacht, which had room to carry a sea plane on its deck, in search of the wondrous. He traversed the ocean floor in the cumbersome brass diving suits of the day. There was no place too far or too deep to stop the wealthy self-styled adventurer from exploring it. And while he was down there, he collected whatever treasures he found in the ocean for his museum. The Eagle’s Nest has fantastic cases with labels reading, “Bottom material dredged off of the Chilean Coast, 5 miles from Lengua de Vaca Light, Ton Gay Peninsula. Dredging at 90 fathoms with 350 meters of wire out. “Alva” Cruise, ‘38.” Each case is filled with chunks of rock, coral, bone, and shell, all neatly laid out by size and shape, according to the collector’s whim.

Oh - and he was also a race car driver.

Dan Wickett pointed out the impressive looking new title from Unbridled Books: The Annotated Nose by Marc Estrin. I have no idea what this one is about but the cover sure looks cool and Dan says the whole book is a neat package:

A lovely dust jacket, red inlays, dozens of full page photos/pieces of art, a novel on the left-hand side pages and annotations regarding the novel on the right-hand side pages. This book, at $39.95, is pricier than the others, and most hardcovers you're going out to find in stores these days but is exactly what I point out in the opening paragraph - an object, not just a story (and this from somebody who values stories at an extremely high level), but a true piece of art to be enjoyed in this form.

Spendy ($39.95) but a nice treat for someone deserving.

I can't believe how talented Neil Gaiman is.

There was a wonderful article in the Guardian about artists in WWI - an area of particular interest to me. It includes mention of the works of women about the war - an area often overlooked:

In the aftermath of war, women's voices were often forgotten, despite the fact that they conjured up some of its most powerful emblems. Rose Macaulay's Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), and Virginia Woolf's whirling stream-of-consciousness narrative Mrs Dalloway (1925) exposed the plight of shellshocked soldiers. Women writers - and their heroines - demolished distinctions between the home front and frontline, and resisted assumptions about femininity, asserting that life was "Not So Quiet" for the "Stepdaughters of war" (Helen Zenna Smith's novel about a female ambulance corps, which ricochets from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On the Western Front).

The Return of the Soldier is one of the most amazing, and quietly devastating, books on war I've read. I love it.

Nerdfighters profiled in Orion Magazine for their activism - all John Green fans please take note.

As always, I worried that the Blog Blast Tour would not come together and as always, it did in a very big way. Thanks to all the authors who agreed to the interviews (and especially editor Ellen Datlow who answered my many obtuse questions with both limitless patience). The participating bloggers - well as usual you guys dazzled me, plain and simple. I hope that we were able to bring some wonderful authors to the attention of prospective readers and hopefully we will be back with the spring tour in May 2009.

[Post pic of Willie K Vanderbilt - race car hero.]