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One of the best parts about my job as an events coordinator is that I get to go to at least three cultural events a week, and get paid for it.

One of the worst parts is that I can't go to all of the other events that are happening at the same time.

Bookstores in New York have a different issue when it comes to author events than stores in most other places. For us, it's not so hard getting good authors to appear; the hard part is competing with the million other great things that are going on at the same time in the same city.

Tonight (Wednesday), I'm thrilled to meet Meg Wolitzer as she reads from her new book The Ten-Year Nap -- she's one of our sharpest observers of women's lives and Western culture, and totally funny, too.

But if I wasn't at my store, I'd be at Rocketship in Brooklyn for a book party with Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple for their collaboration on the new Omega The Unknown comics. Two of my favorite creators in one place! -- not fair!

And tomorrow night (Thursday), we've got not only a party for an amazing Russian poetry anthology, with authors actually flown in from Russia and local translators and food and wine... we've ALSO got the brilliant and charming Simon Van Booy, one of our store's favorite authors, doing an intimate reading and conversation about his brand-new cult classic genius short story collection The Secret Lives of People In Love. (We recently did some renovation at the bookstore that allow us to have one event going on upstairs and another one downstairs -- more authors! more choices! Luckily I get to go to both of these, at least for a little bit at a time...)

But, at the same time, my buddy and fellow entrepreneur David Del Vecchio is inaugerating his BRAND NEW INDIE BOOKSTORE, Idlewild Books, with a reading, discussion and reception for Murat Kurnaz's book, Five Years Of My Life, about his internment in Guantanamo. I can't wait to see David's dream come true, and the book sounds amazing.

But lucky you -- YOU get to choose which of these events to attend. Good luck, and welcome to the trials of book nerd life in New York City!

By Anatoly Liberman

The Devil is uppermost in people’s thoughts, and his names are many. One of them is Old Nick. Its origin is obscure. The word nicker “water sprite,” explained as an old participle “(a) washed one,” is unrelated to it. Then there is nickel. The term was easy to coin, but copper could not be obtained from the nickel ore, and Axel F. von Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist despite von before Cronstedt, called the copper-colored metal copper nickel (German Kupfernickel), later shortened to nickel, after the name of a perfidious mountain demon (wolfram and especially cobalt have a similar history). (more…)

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