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Remember those childhood trips to Pizza Hut — that greasy pizza justified by the fact that you were picking up a Book It! star? Those hologram buttons proudly displayed on your Jansport? How many of you thought that this program was long gone, that the program dissolved when buttons went out of style and the Boxcar Children stopped going on adventures?

Well, believe it or not, the Boxcar Children are still going on adventures and the Book It! program is still thriving. This week marks the 23rd year of National Young Readers’ Week — an event co-founded by Pizza Hut and the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. That’s right — stuffed crust meets Washington, D.C.

The Book It! program has evolved a bit since the mid-80s — minutes and books are logged online and this year, in addition to the Pizza Hut sponsorship, Book It! is partnered with Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Today’s Book It! program even features a lemur named Dewey who teaches card-holding young readers how to utilize their library.

Visit the Book It! website to learn more, and relive a bit of your childhood.

Acne-ridden and braces-clad, my nerdy high school self was always the one to ask the guy to Prom. And Homecoming. And Winter Formal. But every March, my girl-asks-out-the-guy pattern was no longer perceived as odd and was adopted by every girl in school. The Sadie Hawkins Dance. The stuff of Relient K songs. And proposals on Leap Day. But this holiday — yes, holiday — is actually meant to take place in the middle of November.

Sadie Hawkins was the daughter of Hekzebiah Hawkins — one of Dogpatch’s earliest settlers in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner. (I know, I know. You all thought I was giving you an actual history lesson.) Described as the “homeliest gal in all them hills,” Sadie was still a spinster at 35 (gasp!) when her father rounded up all the unmarried men in Dogpatch, challenging them to a foot race. The men would be given a head-start before Sadie started running. Whichever man she caught would have to marry Sadie.

Though the original race took place on November 15, 1937, the spinsters of Dogpatch loved this idea so much, they banded together to make Sadie Hawkins day an annual event, celebrated every year on the Saturday following November 9.

So ladies, this November 10th go run after a guy in an empty field. Or just ask a fella to dinner.

Most readers can build worlds in their minds from simply reading the words on a page. But, sometimes they are not so good a building practical things to store their volumes of words. Some readers know what a hammer is in theory and how it is used in the context of Thor, but they’ve never picked one up at the local hardware store.

What do you do if you want that homemade touch to your bookshelf, but don’t know the difference between flat and phillips head screws? You turn to Etsy.

Thankfully bookshelf creating experts can be found all over Etsy selling their wares. They range from the tiny and cute, to the massive and impractical. What makes it even better is that many of these helpful craftspeople can custom make your shelf to almost any dimension you want. Just not the 4th dimension, they haven’t figured that one out yet.

Here’s a look at some of our favorite bookshelves you can buy on Etsy right now.

Over the weekend, some Night of the Living Trekkies fans decided to appear as undead Trekkies at an event at Disneyland.

Lindsay Stanley, Bri Bower, and Kara Rickert sent over this amazing picture and the author, Kevin David Anderson, shared it with us. Now we're sharing it with you! Because… well, just look at them! Awesome. 

What would I do if I knew the world would be ending in six months?

Hell, I don’t know. Weep, I guess. Weep a lot. So much weeping. And I would say “shit” a good many times. And eat lots of peaches. And pizza. I would use drugs. In tandem. Cognac sipped in between huffs of paint. I would watch no reruns of Quincy. I would eat lobster for breakfast. Naked. No more shaving.

I would set a goal to see how fat I could get before the world ended and then do everything possible to meet that goal. This would involve large amounts of pie. The preferred pie would be lemon meringue, but every kind of pie would be on my radar, save mincemeat. Hell, even mincemeat. Sniff enough glue and probably even mincemeat tastes good. I don’t even know what mincemeat is.

Music would be listened to, and it would be loud. The Smiths, mostly. I would stop worrying about getting a melanoma. Probably I would engage in some self-delusion regarding the afterlife, skim through Buddhist texts, dream of reincarnation as a molecule in Saturn’s outer ring. I’d fart freely, and with passion. Snorkeling would take center stage; tennis put on the back burner.

If I knew the world were ending in six months, I’d read a lot about dinosaurs and scarf Kobe beef sliders, dance to New Order, watch Candy Stripers III and some of the other soft porn I’ve missed. I’d let my ear hair grow willy-nilly and try to braid it into something startling.

Jay Wexler is the author of The Odd Clauses and The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, and Other Stories. Photo via http://bit.ly/SxkwVj.

It's almost Halloween, which means for us bibliophiles it's a time for reading horror novels and celebrating the Neil Gaiman created holiday All Hallow's Read! It's the very best of the scary and the literary.

Way back in 2010 (eons ago) Neil Gaiman wrote a blog post about how there aren't enough holidays revolving around the giving of books and since Halloween was right around the corner, All Hallow's Read was born. The premise is simple: gift a scary (age appropriate) book on October 31st.

While it would be fun to give every trick-or-treater a book, it also runs the risk of being not very cost effective so here are some tips for having a fiscally responsible All Hallow's Read.