My reading list for the next three to six years

Courtesy of The Globe and Mail's list of the top fiction from 2008. Time to dust off that library card - none of these is exactly cheap.

I will never make it through all of these, but a girl can dream, right?

In other news, the "long list" for the 2009 Giller Award came out earlier this week. (And in a truly cringe-worthy show of irony, the Globe's copy editors didn't catch the misspelling of the word "chromosome" in the headline of their Books blog.)

Here are this year's finalists for your viewing (and reading-list-making) pleasure. Of the 12 authors chosen, only two are men, which is extremely unusual. I like Scowen's three possible conclusions from this information; my gut says it's a mix between #2 and #3.

Margaret Atwood for The Year of the Flood

Martha Bailie for The Incident Report

Kim Echlin for The Disappeared

Claire Holden Rothman for The Heart Specialist

Paulette Jiles for The Color of Lightning

Jeanette Lynes for The Factory Voice

Annabel Lyon for her novel The Golden Mean

Linden MacIntyre for his novel The Bishop’s Man

Colin McAdam for Fall

Anne Michaels for The Winter Vault

Shani Mootoo for Valmiki’s Daughter

Kate Pullinger for The Mistress Of Nothing

**Edited to add:
Apparently it's highly appropriate for me to be nitpicking the Globe for its spelling errors on today of all days. September 24th is National Punctuation Day. May the so-called "language-arts fusspots" unite!

Unbelievably lazy blogging

I half-arsedly chronicled my thoughts during tonight's Emmy Awards on Twitter. Here they are in all their glory. You'll have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks for the parts where I got up to get more cheese.

******

We interrupt this Emmy telecast with Michael "Dracula" Ignatieff's commercial claiming He Can Do Better. I want proof, fangs.

chills_7 @meghan_moloney Yes!!! I was brainstorming for a Halloween costume. Ignatieff is an awesome idea!! Thanks

@chills_7 You will def have to take photos of that. Make sure to wear your Harvard tie and carry around a little Dion voodoo doll.

Seeing clips of the last Idol finale makes me relive the pain of seeing Adam Lambert NOT WIN. Emmy telecast, why must you torture me?

Third time's a charm -- let's see if the CBS team can come back from commercial break without airing audio of backstage inner workings.

....nope.

Oh Ricky Gervais. I kind of wish he was hosting. NO -- I'm sorry, Neil Patrick. I didn't say that out loud. Just pretend that didn't happen.

All the shows I don't watch are winning. Have I been paying attention to the wrong shows? Or do I just have bad taste? Disturbing.

shetu07 @meghan_moloney don't doubt your taste. doubt THEIRS.

Thanks, @shetu07. I knew you believed in me. Speaking of taste, what is with all the man-glasses?

In Memoriam segment on now... I am officially blubbering.

My taste in TV is vindicated!! Hooray, Mad Men!!

Glenn Close, OMG! I love all the strong older super-women owning this show tonight.

shetu07 @meghan_moloney I love Jessica Lange for sort of acknowledging that older women don't get many roles

@shetu07 You need to watch this: http://tinyurl.com/my2o53 same topic, great discussion.

Wants moar Don Draper, plees.

"I'm just a poor kid from the valley. I feel like Cinder-fella."

Bob Newhart is hilarious. Though, his timing is slightly off.

MORE VINDICATION!! 30 Rock wins! 22 nominations! My favorite Tina Fey! love.

Intrigued by this voting for Breakthrough Performance... but suspect the results will be similar to Allen beating Lambert. Ppl are stupid.

'Fame'. September 25th. I cannot contain myself.

Mad Men again! Thank you.

*****

And thus concludes the 2009 Emmys. For a much sassier and fashion-oriented commentary on the Emmy Red Carpet, go on over and visit the Fug Girls. They've always got something to say.

Meta-publishing on the Interwebz

Greetings! I've been taking a break from posting for awhile. Is it just me, or do all interesting, thought-provoking, and blog-post-worthy ideas ONLY EVER occur during work hours, when I am at the office and feel like blogging is probably not good for billable hours? Sometimes I write things down on sticky-notes, to remind myself later on of my epic ideas. But by the time I get home, I no longer care enough to drag myself out of my tired stupor to actually post anything. Also, the sticky-notes usually say really cryptic things like "BOOKS" or "Atwood Twilight".

In any case, I've been more of an internet lurker lately than a participant. But I am proud to say that I have finally made my first official contribution to my friend Shetu's online mag, Doll Magazine. The mag started after we finished journalism school and started looking around for something real to do with our lives, and I have to say that Shetu - like so many of my other illustrious and successful former classmates - has done something very real and impressive.

Under the Blog section, Doll has started a weekly feature of Twitter picks, wherein contributors who are also Twitter users pick their top five followees and explain what's so rad about them. Doll being what it is - a publication aimed at young liberal-minded women - and me being what I am, it wasn't hard to find contenders on my Twitter feed whose ethos would resonate well with readers. In fact, the hardest part was narrowing them down to five. But I did. And you can see my picks, and justifications, in last week's post.

It turned into a weirdly interesting experiment for me. I ended up re-evaluating half of the people I follow, especially those I started following soon after creating my Twitter account and had no idea what I was looking to get from the experience. I also noticed that I have surprisingly few news-based feeds, most likely because I already have a complex RSS system set up in my capacity as media-monitoring guru at work, so I've already seen the major outlets' stories.

But mostly, I realized what I'm mainly looking for from Twitter is amusement: the feeds I am most drawn to are those which are clever enough to say something distinct in 140 characters or less, without resorting to inane abbreviations or web-lingo. I guess it's my language-junkie side peeking through again, but there are people who can do amazing things with a Tweet. The other factor here is that I don't have a smartphone, therefore I don't check Twitter obsessively like every Crackberry-head I see wandering around the city. So it wouldn't be a practical way for me to actually follow online news and pop culture's daily obsessions. And as a friend of mine said the other day, it's just one more thing you have to update regularly, on top of Facebook and the rest of it.

Speaking of regular updates, I'm toying with the idea of live-blogging the Emmy awards this Sunday night, after being told that my Oscars live-blog was entertaining. The jury's still out on this one.