Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!

Katherine Rosman has a new column in the Wall Street Journal — her first is titled “The Dance of Marriage: Who Does What?” and discusses how couples balance the various tasks in a marriage.

The Atlantic figured out the identity of the man behind the @MayorEmanuel Twitter account, and did a profile of him. I loved this section that compares to Twitter to older forms of storytelling:

Whatever we end up calling @MayorEmanuel, the feed shares some characteristics with the picaresque novel. In the picaresque, adventures tend to happen in episodes. There’s usually some sort of (anti-)hero bopping around and you don’t necessarily expect one adventure to logically lead to the next. With reference to the traditional Spanish genre which emerged in the 17th century, scholars even like to talk about the fragmentation of the picaresque as indicative of a “refusal (or inability) to conceal the labour or process of writing.” Writing happens in fits and starts, so the finished product should look that way, too. And that’s the thing, with a Twitter narrative, your lines come stamped with a time and the kind of software used to send the message. You can’t conceal the process of writing, so you have to learn to love that transparency.

Those of you who use NetGalley for ebook galleys might find this useful — the site put together a list of things publishers look for in approving galleys. I don’t use the service as much as I could, but it’s a great option for people who like review copies and to review new books.

This open letter from Josh Marshwell, president of sales from HarperCollinsPublishers, wrote an open letter to librarians explaining the company’s new policy for ebook lending limits.

Andi (Estella’s Revenge) wrote about using reading as a form of discipline — intriguing!

Shelf Awareness had a Q&A with Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking With Einstein (my review coming this week!).

Sunday is one of my favorite days of the week because I read so many blogs that write great posts for The Sunday Salon. These are some of my favorites from this week:

• Learning How to Read (Erin at Erin Reads)
• Confessions of a Grumpy Reader (Trish at Love, Laughter, and a Touch of Insanity)
• Remembering Books (Trisha at eclectic / eccentric)
• Reading Under the Influence (Jenny at Shelf Love)

And I almost forgot! My most recent books column posted online last week, so check it out if you’re curious about the fate of one local bookstore and some bookish events around Madison.

Since I did a couple of musings on reading posts already this week — asking about a perfect reading month and thinking about reading and remembering and forgetting — I think this post is going to be just a little bit random.

I haven’t done much reading this weekend because Boyfriend and I did a Lord of the Rings movie marathon. We did The Fellowship of the Ring on Friday night, then powered through The Two Towers and The Return of the King last night. This was a big deal because I’ve been pretty adamant with him about how much I dislike those movies (don’t shun me!). The first time I watched them I thought they were too long and too confusing — I’ve never read the books, so I just got lost. But this time I actually focused, asked questions, and ended up enjoying them, even if we did stay up until 1:30 in the morning finishing the last one.

I also spent time at the Capitol in Madison at the protests this weekend. I’m not a big protester — I don’t really like to yell or chant and whatnot — but it was interesting to be down there and be part of something. As a quick update from my “I’m Proud of My Wisconsin” post, the “Fab 14” Democratic senators are still on the run, Scott Walker introduced his biennial budget and still refuses to negotiate, and the Legislature remains mostly at a stand-still. If you want to get a sense of what’s going on, I suggest looking through my friend Mark Richers photostream on Flickr, or following my Delicious links marked WIbudget.

And today… I’m not sure I’ll get to read much either. Boyfriend and I are going to our wine tasting group this afternoon, and I have some blogging and apartment chores to get done before then. If I do get to read, I’ll be diving into The United States of Arugula by David Camp, which is the pick for BookClubSandwich, the online foodie book club I host with Andi (Estella’s Revenge). I gotta get reading — discussion starts on March 14!

How was your reading weekend? Get a lot accomplished?

I finished Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything a couple of days ago, and can’t wait to post my review of it next week.  But, like most great nonfiction, there were a lot of anecdotes and facts that didn’t make it into the review and I wanted to share.

This section is from the chapter on “The End of Remembering,” the transition from a culture that valued memory to a culture that can’t seem to remember anything. One of the reasons Foer discusses is the proliferation of books — once we could write things down, it wasn’t that important to remember them. And as a result, the way we read started to change. Foer talks about this change in a way I think many book bloggers will find familiar:

Now we put a premium on reading quickly and widely, and that breeds a kind of superficiality in our reading, and in what we seek to get out of books. You can’t read a page a minute, the rate at which you’re probably reading this book, and expect to remember what you’ve read for any considerable length of time. If something is going to be made memorable, it has to be dwelled upon, repeated.

In his essay, “The First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a switch from “intensive” to “extensive” reading that occurred as books began to proliferate. Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” says Darnton. “They had only a few books — the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two — and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed in their consciousness.”

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If you could have a perfect reading month, what would it look like?

I felt awesome when I got done with my reading in January, but looking back at my reading in February, I’m not sure I’d call the month perfect. It was good — I read some books I liked a lot — but I didn’t get through as many as I’d like (only 7), and I don’t think the balance between personal/library/review books was what I’d want to have moving forward. Granted, I did decide to spend the month focusing on review copies, but I think in the long run that’s a bad plan.

So if February wasn’t awesome, what exactly would make a “perfect” reading month for me?

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