I know that there have been plenty of times when I have stopped to think, “What would so-and-so do in this situation?” and this article really made me think back and reflect on my habits and reading. I love to re-read Gone with the Wind, and I feel protective of Scarlett as I imagine what life might have been like for her. Now I wonder if I’m more flirtatious or take on more of a ruthless attitude towards the world as I read and think about Miss O’Hara.

What do you think? Have you ever lived vicariously through a book character? Do you think you emulate your favorite characters?

Yet who would have guessed our kiddies were scrounging for eggs on the site of a legendary literary murder?

Not me, until I read this piece in the Times about the Beat writers and how Lucian Carr, mentor to Ginsberg and Kerouac at Columbia, murdered the childhood stalker who had followed Carr to New York from St. Louis. Afterwards, Carr dumped the body in the Hudson—and must have dragged it right through the spot where we were picnicking 68 years later!

Well, morbid connections aside, I love this story for a few reasons. One, I’ve been a big fan of the Beats since high school when my lit-mag friends and I would traipse down to Café Reggio on MacDougal Street and pretend we were hipsters over cappucinos—though, full disclosure, I didn’t actually read any of their work until post-college. But when I did, I was hooked, and even now I’ve probably re-read HOWL and ON THE ROAD more than any other books on my shelf.

Two, it’s always fun to hear a new story about literary heroes, especially a nicely lurid one like this. But I especially love how it places the rowdy, anti-establishment Beats firmly in the Columbia literary culture—somehow, it makes them more relatable without deflating their impact, sort of like Thoreau heading home from Walden for dinner.

And three, it reaffirms my book-love for NYC. I mean, you could walk down virtually any street in any borough and there’s some kind of literary connection—a scene from a favorite book, the residence of a famous writer, the site (or former site) of a bookstore or writers’ bar or some other hangout. And in a few instances, like Riverside Park, something much more sinister…

So, how mortifying if one’s final words as a writer were pedestrian—“I’m dying,” “Get me a glass of water,” “Ugh.”  Just think how put out the people hanging around your bedside as you are preparing to breathe your last would be if you didn’t come up with a concluding statement for the ages.

Or maybe it’s just me.  This HuffPost offering has me thinking about what I would like my last words to be.  It’s important to be concise (you probably won’t have much time), clever but somewhat profound—unless satire is your métier—and sincere.  So, I think I’m going to start working on the perfect goodbye phrase.  Hopefully, I won’t need to use it  for a very, very long time, but it’s good to be prepared.  After all, you only have one chance to get it right.

What would your last words be?  Would you be sweet like Virginia Woolf, poetic like Emily Dickinson, pissy like Eugene O’Neill, or droll like Oscar Wilde?  Give me some suggestions.  If nothing else, a good parting phrase will come in useful in your fiction.

While you must, of course, be careful trusting history or information given in a novel as fact, as a  novel is, by definition, fiction, I’ve learned many useful (and many more useless) things simply by enjoying a book. Whether it be rudimentary philosophy, practices unique to various cultures or eras, definitions or obscure words or scientific classifications, every writer of every book has a knowledge and understanding unique to themselves—as do, of course, the readers! In so writing purely what one knows (as goes the age-old advice), there must be some assumption that every bit of background or situational intelligence is common knowledge. Otherwise, books would have to be at least twice as long purely on account of necessary explanation of every little thing.

Sometimes it’s just that a book was written in a past decade or century, and society as portrayed in, say, Pride and Prejudice may not have been a groundbreaking description when Austen first published, but is insightful to modern readers. Even just a sense of a different human experience can spark an interest that was previously dormant and leads to further reading and research. Luckily, my passion for trivia is trumped only by my passion for books, so the two feed well off of each other. What sort of things have you been lead to learn more about because of a novel? Are there any novels in particular that you feel have taught you something—whether or importance or simple fun fact?

I’m a sucker for period architecture, so it’s sad to see a beautiful house with a storied history get reduced to rubble. But at the very least, it’s nice to see it live on in the pages of a novel that certainly claims a firm spot within American literature.

Last week demonstrated that few people note, or especially care, about the publisher behind a given book, which means that it is a distinct minority that pays attention to the colophon, the little logo printed on a book’s spine. Knopf has a sleek borzoi, Harper a torch, and Random House a rather distinctive house. For anyone who has ever puzzled over where those symbols originate (or fans of generally useless trivia) here is the provenance of the little house on the big books.