Tonight | Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge | 7 pm

When Vyacheslav Molotov wasn’t busy helping Stalin commit genocide and sundry misdeeds, he collected rare and beautiful books. Journalist Rachel Polonsky got to know this when, for a time, she lived in his apartment.

It's no secret Yahoo! Answers is the cesspit of the Internet, a place where coherent thought goes to die. Recently, I found out it had a Books section. I went searching for Babby, but instead I found several confused people, some misguided aspiring authors, and a whole bunch of high school students too lazy to do their homework.

I hate hardcovers, and I fully support those who don't buy them. For we who wait, here's a list of when my five favorite books from 2010 that have yet to come out in paperback will be released in paperback, presented in chronological order (though the Jennifer Egan is my favorite by a huge margin):

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte: March 1st ($15.

Donna Tartt has a new book in the works. According to the store blog of Greenwood, MS independent Turnrow Books:

This weekend, I met someone who had read Infinite Jest twice. "I read it thrice," I told him. My one-upmanship wasn't entirely honest -- the third time was only a partial. Now there's a blog that makes me feel/seem like even more of an affected asshole.

People Holding 'Infinite Jest' is a brand-new Tumblr that collates photos of people holding Infinite Jest

My pal @shoogyboomz sat next to Chloe Sevigny on a train to New York from Connecticut yesterday. She took this covert pic with her iPhone:

The Big Love star is reading a 1992 edition of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem/ Play It As It Lays.

I'm sure Chloe chose the book because Didion is a master prose stylist, not because the cover features a thin blonde in a bad floral dress and oversized sunglasses.

Say you're some Barnes and Noble wage slave working on a Tuesday night a couple weeks before Christmas. Suddenly, a group of middle class white people start asking you about a book that's not in the inventory, and then they hold an impromptu reading. Chaos!

Mischief and Mayhem, the new publishing collective founded by Dale Peck and Choire Sicha (among others), will stage the happening as a dangerous launch party for its first title, Lisa Dierbeck's The Autobiography of Jenny X

Today, December 6th, 2010: Jonathan Franzen appears on Oprah. And I'm liveblogging it.

3:59 pm: The teaser has a hug! Oprah says they've never met before, but it seems like they have. Nice suit, Franzen!

4pm: Michael Jackson was friends with some unappealing, wan family from New Jersey, which will occupy the first half of the episode.

Julia Child called an elderly French food critic a "didactic meatball." Oh, snap!

I came across this terrific burn while reading Saveur. They published an excerpt of As Always, Julia, a new book that collects the letters sent between Julia Child and lifelong friend / unofficial literary agent, Avis DeVoto.

The title of New Yorker critic Alex Ross’s new book, Listen to This (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), takes its name from an essay about the discovery by this “classical music purist” of pop music via Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu as a Harvard undergraduate. Programming avant-garde classical music at the school’s WHRB-FM, Ross began hanging out with the noise-punk crowd at the Record Hospital show

Based on an informal survey of local booksellers, I predict that Nicole Krauss' third novel, Great House, is a shoo-in to win the National Book Award. Her Friday reading at the Brookline Booksmith will be the last stop on her U.S. tour.

I finished Great House this weekend while on queasy bus rides to and from New York City.

NICK BILTON is one of the people we listen to most closely on tech. Now the Times' lead technology writer, he's a veteran of New York Press (during that publication's golden years) and of the Times's research-and-development lab. In his new book, I Live In the Future and Here's How It Works, he begins by checking in on an industry often credited with pushing digital innovation -- yep, porn -- and discovers that it has suffered a death just as ugly as any entrenched old-media vertical.

Every book festival needs legendary dudes like DENNIS LEHANE and TOM PERROTTA -- the kinds of authors whose stories are famous even to people who don't read books. The awesome thing about Lehane and Perrotta is that they've both given far more than their celebrity to the cause: last year Lehane used his star power to throw some shine on Boston's lesser-known mystery authors in Boston Noir, a compendium whose launch party headlined the inaugural Boston Book Festival.

Neil Gaiman presumably could not be torn away from his young goth bride, and Joyce Carol Oates had already been hired to give the keynote. But the two most famous contributors to My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: 40 New Fairy Tales -- an anthology of "new stories sewn from old skins" -- are not necessarily its best.