JHENIFER PABILLANO

1. The Baby-sitters Club Series by Ann M. Martin
Goodbye club meetings! Stoneybrook parents won’t tolerate having just three half-hours a week to book a sitter by phone. Instead, Kristy creates online babysitter bookings and hires a Bangalore call centre to field any phone inquiries. Virtual assistants coordinate the sitters’ schedules in Google Calendar, and all club meetings would take place over Gchat. The babysitting diaries of course become a password-protected blog. Also: Kristy gets profiled in Inc., Jackie Rodowsky’s accidents become YouTube sensations, and Charlotte Johanssen gets cyberbullied (but learns a valuable lesson about online privacy and the nature of true friendship).

2. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews
Chris, Cathy, and their younger twin siblings disappear, but astute friends notice a lack of Facebook updates, text messages and Gchat conversations. A concerned message gets quickly retweeted and reposted throughout the social world: “Do you know where the Dollanganger Four are?” Soon, a Metafilter thread examining the issue leads to several parties digging up the Dollangangers’ twisted family history via online genealogical resources, and local authorities are swiftly dispatched to Foxworth Hall to retrieve the kids. Olivia, Corrine, and Bart Winslow are arrested, and Cathy and Chris give an exclusive interview follows with Anderson Cooper, tying into their soon-to-be released tell-all book. All the brother-on-sister action still happens though.

3. Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
Living in the shadow of her beautiful twin Caroline, Louise Bradshaw takes to the internet and develops a devoted following by blogging about crabbing, cooking and rustic pursuits in Chesapeake Bay. Teen Vogue profiles her after she signs a book deal with HarperCollins: the article contains a small sidebar about her twin sister’s budding vocal career and jewelry line.

4. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
Mostly the same except with more texting and Facebooking and the like. Also, Margaret spends a bunch of time discussing her conflicted search for religion in the message boards on the Teenage Softies website. A community manager dispenses ineffectual advice with lots of exclamation marks, and sends Margaret an online promo code to get a free trial pack of Softies, “for being such a great contributor!”

5. Ghostwriter - PBS TV show
Ghostwriter is totally obsolete: texting and instant messaging render his skills completely worthless. Lenni and Jamal still take to wearing pens on lanyards, however.

Outstanding!

I looked up Curtis Grahauer and he appears to be a Vancouver artist: here’s an article on his work and his YouTube account. Thank you, Curtis, for such a brilliant moment of delight.

(The book is Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, if you’re curious.)

Well, over the past few months, I’ve become an unequivocal Witold Rybczynski superfan.

This all started after I picked up one of Witold’s books, The Most Beautiful House in the World, from the local library. I’d read his architecture criticism at Slate before, and I knew he was a renowned professor, but none of it quite prepared me for the spectacular nature of his long-form writing.

The Most Beautiful House in the World was ostensibly about the construction of Witold’s house outside Montreal, but it quickly became a considered reflection on the craft of architecture and the qualities of a good home. Witold had a clear, measured voice, and he wove a wealth of thoughtful historical detail throughout his book. Let’s put it this way: reaching the end of the book was like finishing a long, rich conversation with an old, dear friend. And it was bloody nonfiction!

The next step was obvious. I had to reserve and read all of his books as soon as possible—and I did, much to my delight. It turns out Witold dives into topics that seem wholly abstract, but pulls them to earth in a way that is fascinating and wise and illuminating all at once. Home: A Short History of an Idea looked at how we had developed the concept of the private home reserved for family. Waiting for the Weekend examined how we developed the concept of the weekend and our sense of leisure time. City Life looked at how the American city came to be the way it was. The list goes on, and on.

One more thing, however, makes Witold’s writing so riveting—and it’s that his style is a sharp and invigorating contrast to a lot of nonfiction you find today. Malcolm Gladwell’s influence on the form has made some people dive into fascinating subjects but come up with very little to say. But Witold plumbs subjects with scholarly intelligence that remains approachable. He’s not trying to be breezy, he’s not aiming to thrill you with laboriously tortured narratives, and he’s not trying to tie a bunch of disparate concepts and events into a unified theory that secretly runs the universe. He’s more like a tour guide for this world, writing to help us understand where we are and where we’ve come from. There’s substance and wisdom there. I’m hooked.