1. The 2012 Bucket List. As we all know, the world is probably ending in December. The Mayans were right about a lot of things: architecture, chocolate, the gold standard. It's not that I'm jumping on the apocalyptic bandwagon, I just want to hedge my bets. I want to eat a lot of good food and go standing paddle-boarding and see Kiefer Sutherland in person. I want to participate in one of those restaurant specials where you eat a piece of meat bigger than your head and then win the meal and a t-shirt and get your polaroid up on the wall next to pictures of big, red men with mustaches. This also means that the books released in 2012 will be the last new books ever printed. All your reading between now and December 21st is the most important reading you'll ever do! So, if you need help compiling your 2012 Bucket-List-Reading-List, refer to this handy guide from The Millions, The Most Anticipated: The Great 2012 Book Preview. (If you need help compiling your non-literary bucket list, come into the store and we can talk about it.)

2. Twilight redux. I've been waiting for this, ever since the Harry Potter spoofs have died off. This is completely silly, but the ones for Kate Chopin and Ayn Rand made me chuckle. If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight.

3. A Good Podcast is Hard to Find. Confession: when given the choice between fantastic nonfiction and fairly mediocre fiction, I usually choose the latter. I think it's too many years spent in the American school system, choking down over-simplified history books, or else let's blame the glitter-allure of fantasy instilled by Disney. Yeah. Disney. But I've stumbled across a podcast that's changing my attitude towards nonfiction. June Thomas caught my eye with the first installment of her new Slate-based podcast, The Afterword, which features nonfiction authors and their books, with a piece on the fate of the print dictionary. I know. It sounds riveting. But something about hearing the executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary talk about the project in all its complexity had me wanting a copy of my own. The podcast comes out every other Saturday, look forward to episodes about Robert Neuwirth and his book Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy and Matthew Polly and his book Tapped Out: Rear Naked Chokes, the Octagon, and the Last Emperor: An Odyssey in Mixed Martial Arts.