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• Surprise: Philip Roth is not a fan of e-books and “the distracting influences of modern technology, which he feels diminishes the ability to appreciate the beauty and aesthetic experience of reading books on paper.” He says, “I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can’t stand change anyway.”

• Rob Sheffield, whose first book was about love and tragedy and nostalgia and mix tapes, and whose latest book is called Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, does a playlist for the Times, noting, “Writing about music and writing about memory are basically the same thing.”

• Thank you, James Collins, for pointing out that few people remember everything they read, but that books are worth reading anyway.

• Frank Kovarick definitely remembers The Hardy Boys.

• The Times profiles sidewalk book salesman Charles Mysak, who is depressed about the Barnes & Noble by Lincoln Center closing, and asks, “If a saloon and bookstore can’t make it on the Upper West Side, what better evidence do you need than that of the decline of artistic and free thought? If this is happening here, what must you see in the hinterlands of America?”

• But why stand out on the street if you have a bar-code scanner? Writing at Slate, Michael Savitz is a little embarrassed by his method of buying used books to sell, but it does the job:

The book merchant of the high-cultural imagination is a literate compleat and serves the literate. He doesn’t need a scanner, because he knows more than the scanner knows. I fill a different niche—I deal in collectible or meaningful books only by accident. I’m not deep, but I am broad. My customer is anyone who needs a book that I happen to find and can make money from.

…I rely on a technological castoff to search through other people’s castoff merchandise….My work is crowded by artifacts of thought and expression which the culture hasn’t wanted to conserve.

• I’m about a month behind, but I loved this article about Peter Knego, who collects decor from post-war cruise ships. It’s a little scary to imagine what his house looks like, but this is coming from someone whose floor has warped so much that her bathroom door cannot even begin to close, so. (And actually, maybe my favorite thing is his own website, where there are photos of the old ships he gets this stuff from, being taken apart.)

• A woman left her Paris apartment before WWII and never returned; now her apartment is a time capsule. “[O]ne expert said it was like stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty, where time had stood still since 1900.” It would’ve been amazing even if the place didn’t have a painting in it by the 19th century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini, which just sold for €2.1 million.

• Speaking of which, I love Thomas Beller’s essay about making a home out of your “stuff,” and the eeriness of leaving home for awhile only to come back and find everything where you left it, ready to both reassure and haunt you: “The fact is, I am often transfixed when in the presence of the artifacts of my own existence. Being transfixed is a cousin to being paralyzed.” Various objects and mementos, he finds, “exerted a kind of lunar pull, tugging me out of the present and into the past. It was like seeing an old friend after a long interval and being overcome with the sickening feeling that one of you has changed beyond recognition, that the old magic is gone.”

• With the return of Chock Full o’ Nuts restaurant to NYC (“Get ready for a taste of old New York,” proclaimed The Daily News), Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York put together a “totally unscientific Nostalgia Point system.” Meanwhile, the Algonquin Hotel, which opened in 1902 and where Dorothy Parker used to hang out, is becoming a Marriot.

• Super Mario Bros. turned 25, and everyone has an opinion about whether video games today are better or worse. Other 25th anniversaries: The Breakfast Club. (The cast “reunited” on Good Morning America.) Desperately Seeking Susan. (The Times talks to director Susan Seidelman.) And the premier of The Golden Girls.

• The news that the cast of The Sound of Music is reuniting for the first time since 1965 made me realize I’ve never seen the whole movie. We must have watched it when I was a kid, but I sort of remember falling asleep. The wonderful Rachel Shukert definitely stayed awake to watch Troop Beverly Hills at many slumber parties, but it hasn’t aged quite like she expected.

• Jared Leto’s teen modeling portfolio is amazing. (Calla lilies! Plastic wrap! Long hair! A baby!) And Brian Austin Green explains the world to Details: “90210 only worked because of that time period—because the world didn’t have access to a lifestyle like that. The Internet wasn’t what it is now. With TMZ and Paris Hilton wrecking cars and people being chased on freeways, there’s nothing interesting about Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills is nothing anymore.” And how was it to be famous in the nineties? “Times were simple then.”

• I haven’t read Sara Marcus’s riot grrrl book yet, but Jessica Hopper calls it “a study in memories colliding“:

There is a part where a girl who I don’t remember at all describes me as quiet, insecure and intimidated. I think she has me confused with someone else–she must, I have never been quiet in my life and didn’t know intimidation until I knew humility, which wasn’t until, like, maybe 2004.

• And here’s Hopper interviewing Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan for the Chicago Reader:

JH: On the new record, there’s this nostalgic feeling, but also a sense that you’re policing yourself—that you’re really aware of not wanting to be too wrapped up in the past.

MM: That’s the dueling feeling. It’s something that’s powerful—it’s also about music’s role in nostalgia and its ability to trigger it. It’s a powerful emotional thing, whether it’s about music starting to mean something to you in a real way or a time when music was life changing. It’s different the first time you see Bad Brains. . . . When you’re young, so many things are happening, related to music and not, and that’s all really exciting.

Later, he tells her, “What you’re looking for in nostalgia is that energy.”

• At The Millions, Jacob Lambert takes stock of his favorite “vanished” t-shirts: “In exchange for their service—absorbing our sweat, airing our interests, starting our conversations—the least we can do is offer them tribute.”

• Scientific American sort of explains déjà vu:

All theories of memory acknowledge that remembering requires two cooperating processes: familiarity and recollection. Familiarity occurs quickly, before the brain can recall the source of the feeling. Conscious recollection depends on the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, whereas familiarity depends on regions of the medial temporal cortex.

Basically, déjà vu is what happens when those things get out of snyc. Okay.

• David Carr looks at how generation affects your interpretation of The Social Network:

“When you talk to people afterward, it was as if they were seeing two different films,” said Scott Rudin, one of the producers. “The older audiences see Zuckerberg as a tragic figure who comes out of the film with less of himself than when he went in, while young people see him as completely enhanced, a rock star, who did what he needed to do to protect the thing that he had created.”

My parents, who are not on Facebook and don’t really understand it, loved the movie. My brother, who hates Facebook, is dismissing it because he can. And I loved it because Trent Reznor’s score was great.

• At The Awl, it’s enough already. “This epidemic of easy-to-manipulate “arty” images infesting our blogs and our Facebook pages is way out of control”:

But we have learned to “think” in images this way. These are romantic and really somewhat infantile image techniques. They’re childish and nostalgic. They’re about sunny days and buzzing bees and reading books on a porch, and about road trips and romanticizing urban grime and being oh so gently alienated.

And really, it’s gross.

• A few other things that someone noticed recently ain’t what they used to be: Travel writing. (“The ease of the transitory has hidden the necessity of the eternal.”) The “decadent novel.” (“[T]hose bejewelled, subversive, gloriously unhealthy texts.”)