At a whopping 88 pages long, Intern Alexis was weighed down both literally and figuratively by the behemoth that was this week's New York Times Book Review. And as usual, she went insane. Her guide to what you should pretend to be reading after the jump.

The Letters Of Truman Capote: Too Brief a Treat
 Reviewed by Daniel Mendelsohn

Sometimes we re a little retarded and can use a good beating over the head, but Mendelsohn takes an iron club and beats us until we re bleeding and convulsing on the floor with his monster, 6-page, reflection on the life and works of Truman Capote. He uses a Truman Capote: a disappointment or a genius? Discuss motif to weave this review together — and weave it together, this motif certainly does. Mendelsohn reveals how interesting it is that disappoint and genius were the words that Capote consistently misspelled throughout his letters (dissapoint and genuis) and then spends the whole review, over and over again, coming back to these words, debating which ones should be applied to Capote. Mendelsohn, while acknowledging the genius of In Cold Blood ultimately finds Capote to have been an immature and narrow-minded author, deciding, in the end, that Capote was not entirely a disappointment, but not quite a genius, either. And we were kept waiting for thousands of words to get to that shitty, equivocating conclusion? Our verdict? Capote was dyslexic.

Essay: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back
By Sarah Glazer

We were digging on Sarah Glazer s musings on the rise of the e-Book until we got to the part where Glazer explains that she discovered e-books when she downloaded the Spark Notes to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, we re not going to lie to you and tell you that we never used Spark Notes here and there (okay, all the time) in college. But it s okay that we ve used Spark Notes Reading about Reading is a cheat-sheet. We had to learn the tools of the trade, somehow, right? However, it is not okay that someone writing an essay in the NYTBR uses Spark Notes. That s like finding out that Frank Bruni uses Citysearch.

THEME ALERT! Books of short stories suck! A.O Scott, Terrence Rafferty, and Sophie Harrison hate on literary darlings, Annie Proulx, David Eggers, and Yann Martel (respectively) and their attempts at writing short stories. Rafferty decides that Proulx s short stories, for the most part, suck, and that the comedy in Bad Dirt, is weightless, like tumbleweeds blowing through deserted streets. Scott thinks Eggers is a good person, but ultimately, his short stories suck: Eggers s sundry projects and enterprises have proved that his heart is in the right place, but a lot of How We Are Hungry makes you wonder if his heart is still entirely in his writing. Finally, Sophie Harrison, while acknowledging that Martel has a gift for storytelling, ultimately thinks that his short stories suck. Referring to his new book of short stories, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, she writes: Martel is simply a better teller of tall long stories than tall short ones.

100 Notable Books of the Year
We were not peeing in our pants, to say the least, over the New York Times Notable 100 Books of the Year. The choices seemed pretty obvious and we were generally kind of like, Ooh! The 9/11 Commission Report! How edgy! We can t wait until next week s big bang the top ten comes out. I mean top 100 books of the year? It s like being in the top 25% of your class commendable, but fairly unimpressive.

Essay: Your Best Friend s Reading List
By Laura Miller

Laura Miller ventures into the dark, twisted, deeply upsetting world of those God-awful monsters who have the cruel, tactless audacity to recommend books to you. It s a great book you really should read it : few statements inspire more dread. What?! This is just not a real idea for a personal essay. This is not a real issue nor a real annoyance. Period. Miller goes on to explain how she copes with this very serious problem of making book recommendations: Before I mention a single title, I ask some probing questions: What three books have you loved recently and what did you like about them? Which books have you hated? Why? Only then will I venture to make a suggestion. Hmm we imagined that having a conversation would Laura Miller would be about as fun as taking an SAT II or peeling our eyelids over our foreheads, but now we have confirmation. She ends the essay on a truly crazy note, by comparing book tastes to sexual position preferences: we want to see the correctness of our judgments about books confirmed in the same way we want to be reassured that our erotic preferences are normal. Umm, okay. That's a stretch, but you do whatever you've got to do.