Links, links, links

- Another end-of-year best-books list, this time in the Washington Post, including Lorna Goodison's memoir From Harvey River and (inevitably!) Patrick French's The World Is What It Is.

- At the Harper's Sentences blog, Wyatt Mason reads V.S. Naipaul's introduction to A House for Mr. Biswas and reflects on virtuosity.

- Geoffrey Philp points us to a poem by Fred D'Aguiar in Poetry:

The shoemaker’s wife ran preschool
With a fist made not so much of iron
But wire bristles on a wooden brush.

She made us recite and learn by rote.
Our trick was to mouth words, sound
As if we knew what we would one day

Come to know, what would dawn
On us as sure as a centipede knows
What to do with its myriad legs....

- And Charmaine Valere is slowly making her way through David Dabydeen's Molly and the Muslim Stick, which provokes memories of "inappropriate sexual encounters"....