Lit Bits and a Bit About Buddha

• Dan Wickett has posted my favorite of all e-panels - the 3rd panel of literary translators. It's no secret that I'm fascinated by all things translation and so I a peek in the minds of some of these minds is downright excellent. Not the work they've translated: Bolaño, Georges Perros, Julio Cortázar, Rafael Perez Estrada and many others...several of them are also poets and their own non-translated work is celebrated.  Go check it out. Then tell me which books you'll be reading soon that they translated.
• The week in readings is up at LAist.  I'm particularly looking forward to the Aimee Bender and Amy Gerstler (I love the idea of to authors, same name, different spelling reading on the same night...a trend for LA readings?) reading at Family...an excellent new bookstore in LA that raises the funky level and stocks wonderful art and music treasures too. I always leave with something I had no intention of possessing before I walked in. The sure sign of a good bookstore.
• I'm also working on a Harry Potter Madness post for LAist...I can't decide if all these midnight parties are a good thing for books or a bad thing. It can't be bad...they're buying and reading books, right?  And yet....something feels oh so wrong about it all.  What bugs me, though, eludes me...  And now this posted online bit and the lawyers are all going crazy. It's too much, really.  The first line says it all "Despite a massive security operation..."  I hate that a book needs such an operation. Ugh.
• As my Ireland/Scotland trip nears, I find I'm itching to travel. My feet are ready to walk on unwalked streets, see unseen things.  I want to have a journey elsewhere. So it's perfect that Sebastian Beaumont's piece for The Guardian just made itself known to me - Top 10 Books about Psychological Journeys.  Any list that includes Hesse (x2!), Lessing, Palahniuk and Vonnegut is a good list and should not be ignored.
• The Buddha bit: I'm not big on pop-culture books. I'm not big on any self-help book that someone swore to me I simply had to read. I'm not even big on the ones I've never heard about. Yet because I'm focusing more on meditation and have spent time at my local zen temple, I'm finding Awakening the Buddha Within to be interesting.  While it may eventually veer towards cheesy religious preachiness (which I loathe), it hasn't gotten there yet. We'll see...