Last fall, I read The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the first time. To do justice to my fanatical love for it would take thousands of words. I'll spare you.

It was so good, and so driven by James' appealing voice (the text was taken from a series of lectures he gave in the early 20th century) that it sent me scurrying to learn more about James himself. Luckily, Robert D. Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism had recently been published in paperback.

I'll also spare you my theories about the different ways in which biographies can go wrong. Richardson avoids every possible pitfall. It doesn't hurt that his subject was a brilliant, ebullient man who helped found the philosophy of pragmatism, worked (often ahead of his time) in the field of psychology, and "took stairs two or three at a time until he was past fifty."

If you haven't been following the Tournament of Books, the annual literary equivalent of March Madness staged by the smart folks over at The Morning News, then I apologize for the lack of a spoiler alert in the headline above. (The site has been promising to get a live rooster for the winner any year now.)

For his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz won the final round over Tom McCarthy's Remainder. The panel of 16 judges voted 12-4 in his favor. (That's a landslide, but the tournament officials might want to consider an odd number of judges next year -- this thing is just asking for an 8-8 controversy.)

Diaz's novel has been near the top of my to-read list since it came out last fall. I loved Drown, his debut collection of short stories, and he took a notoriously long time (by the standards of impatient, adoring fans) to finish this novel. I'm not trying to return the favor by not getting around to it -- just hasn't happened yet.

The New York Times recently wrote about a book deal given to the writer of the blog Stuff White People Like. It's a funny site, and while NPR earnestly debated whether it's racist or satire, it's clearly enough of the latter to be palatable. It might not be all that accurate -- I'm so white that some people have called me "see-through," but there are only a handful of things on the site that I really like: for instance, The Wire and Netflix. But it's entertaining.

Blogs have been turning into books for enough years that it's not a huge story, except for the fact that the advance is rumored to be $300,000. Just so you know, Loud, Please is happy to discuss book contracts starting at the rock-bottom price of a hundred grand.