This week in her guide to the Times' Book Review, Intern Alexis fights the pleasure-delaying effects of poor page design to report that writing can get you laid, Tina Brown's hubby Harold Evans does indeed write books, and Pepperidge Farm's legal team is no fun. After the jump, her insight on these very important matters, plus some magical trivia to make any Times geek love you to death.

Letters To The Editor

In her December 19th essay (You Can t Get a Man With a Pen), Prep author Curtis Sittenfeld lamented that female authors like Barbara Kingsolver don t get the boys all wet and gooey inside whereas their male counterparts are able to collect groupie sluts like stamps. Some NYTBR readers have taken issue with Sittenfeld s thesis: Virginia Raymond of Austin, TX writes in that her husband wrote a gushy letter to Barbara Kingsolver and that she had the nerve to respond with an unappreciative form-letter. And Jerome Slater of Buffalo, NY yuks it up, claiming that after publishing The Organization of American States and U.S. Foreign Policy, he couldn t beat them off with a stick. Cause believe us, nothing makes us hotter than foreign policy and state organization. Except boys in hoodie sweatshirts who wear Vans.

Atrocities in Plain Sight
 By Andrew Sullivan

Sean Penn: His Life and Times
 By Richard T. Kelly
Reviewed by Manohla Dargis

Andrew Sullivan s review of recent documentation of the Abu Ghraib scandel was actually incredibly riveting and important both thoughtful and objective and we were all agushy and agog. But when we flipped the page and got to Manohla Dargis s review of Richard T. Kelly s biography of Sean Penn we were like, "Say what?" Where s the transition, Tanenhaus?! Don t make us all rapt and ready for revolution and then give us a dreepy celeb write-up that we ve never even heard about. That s what we in the literary world called blue balling.

They Made America From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators
 By Harold Evans with Gail Buckland and David Lefer
Reviewed by Neil Genzlinger

Neil Ganzlinger reviews Sir Harold Evans s They Made America, a look at 150 American inventions and the inventors who invented them. Ganzlinger poses the interesting question, that is, whether there should be a moratorium on innovating and suggests that maybe innovations have morphed from being things that make life easier to being things that simultaneously make life easier and more complicated. But his argument falters a bit: Venture capital (George Doriot)? Don t understand it. Biotechnology (Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson)? Really don t understand it. Twenty-four-hour news (Ted Turner)? Too much information. Well now you re just being silly! How about a moratorium on weird-o claims? My friend and I have moratoriums on things like the night he threw up on himself or the fact that this play he was in was really bad. Those are matters we just don t discuss. Neil Ganzlinger, we ll give you a moratorium on this review.

TBR: Inside the List
 By Dwight Garner

We were pleasantly surprised by this week s dishy Inside the List. Apparently, Pepperidge Farm sued Tom Perrotta s publisher for using Goldfish crackers on the cover of his fourth novel, Little Children. After a hasty change to chocolate chip cookies, for the paperback edition, Perrotta settled on a photograph of live goldfish in a plastic bag. I love that it s not just a terrific cover but kind of an in-joke, he told Dwight Garner, a way to reclaim the image. Why didn t Pepperidge Farm settle this like the U.S Postal Service did with indie rockers the Postal Service? Election was sort of an indie film right? Tom Perrota should ve performed a small, intimate song and dance number for Pepperidge Farm board members and then that would have been that.

And finally, just write the check out to Intern Alexis:"

You can thank our keen little eyes for this here nugget. Next time there s an awkward silence at cocktail party, mention that Jonathan Lethem was name-dropped not only by Rick Moody ( Recent novels by Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon have indicated how formative comics can be for writers who rely only on words ), but also by Henry Alford ( Recent literary history would suggest first novels that are comedy-laced noirs featuring talking animals can augur huge acclaim and success for their authors: Jonathan Lethem put animal characters like a kangaroo gangster in Gun, With Occasional Music, and later became one of the voices of his generation. ) — both within one page of each other.

Is there now a serious lull in the convo? And have you already covered the weather? Drop this doozie: Just as Lethem was mentioned twice in the NYTBR, so too were birds who mate for life. Patricia O Conner quotes from Carole Cadwalladr s The Family Tree : The dunnock. It mates for life. And D.T. Max, in his review of John Donatich s Ambivalence, A Love Story, writes: whooping cranes are among the few animals that mate for life.

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