1. Gabriel García Márquez might be the best living author (if such a thing can be quantified.)

He’s certainly my favorite and he is “busy completing” a new novel.

We know nothing except its named En Agosto Nos Vemos. (In August, We Will Meet.)

Márquez’s last novel was Memories of my Melancholy Whores, which slipped too deeply into the same territory as Philip Roth’s The Humbling. That is, to say, it doubled as a masturbatory fantasy for old men.

But Marquez has banked infinite goodwill. He wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wrote Love in the Time of Cholera. I will read whatever novel he writes.

I will not, however, be buying his newest book, I Didn’t Come to Give a Speech. It compiles 22 of his speeches, including ones from his high school commencement and Nobel win. As much as I enjoy his rhetoric, I prefer to have it attached to his stories.

2. One more reason to follow Margaret Atwood on Twitter: She might draw you as a superhero.

3. John Warner is an author who doubles as the Biblioracle.

You tell him the last five books you read, and he suggests a new one. To his credit, his suggestions draw from all aspects of literature, often surprise but always make sense.

(My wife’s AP English teacher was John Warner. He seems like the kind of guy who would double as a Biblioracle. I wonder...)

4. Roland Barthes v. Bart Simpson.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com