Want to know why book sales are down and book stores are closing? Here's why: authors are too durn good. Just compare the posts in Read Street to those in ZonTV, the television blog by my colleague, David Zurawik. He just saunters into work each day and takes his pick among the day's scandals: Jon breaking up with Kate and sabotaging the family's TV show, or David Letterman being extorted and confessing to affairs, or ACORN getting caught in a sting. Little wonder that ZonTV often gets more hits than even the Ravens blog.

So what do we have to talk about on Read Street? I'll tell you what: a bunch of well-behaved, studious authors, who live in tidy Roland Park Victorians, wear cardigans and spend all their time reading and writing. Taylor Branch and Anne Tyler. John Barth and Madison Smartt Bell and Elizabeth Spires.

Is it asking so much for just one of them get enmeshed in an extortion plot or have a televised breakup with a spouse? At the very least, how about becoming the target of a jihad for slandering Islam? Geez, the only local authors with the potential for over-sized scandal -- Edgar Allan Poe and F. Scott Fitzgerald -- have been dead for decades.

Even blockbuster national authors such as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer hide from the public these days. Here's Brown's idea of a public splash: interviews in Parade and on the Today show. Hardly the stuff that feeds supermarket tabloids. So I guess we're stuck with books reviews and other news on Read Street. For something juicier, check with Z.