OMG! OUP has a book club! And it’s about classics! (Sound of me fainting dead away).

(Sound of me picking self up.) OK, ANYWAY, last month’s book was Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I’ve never read this and have just ordered it from the library. The current book, the one for June, is Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I will reveal that I started to read Tess about a year ago, got about a third of the way through, and found it so full of impending dread that I had to put it down. If I recall, Tess was about to make a terrible mistake driven by guilt and doubt and desire, a mistake that you just knew would wind up coming back to haunt her a hundredfold.

By myself, I just couldn’t bear to finish the book and see poor Tess crushed by circumstance and fate (at least, this is what seemed to me was going to happen). But for Oxford … I’ll pick it up where I left off and do my darnedest.

Oh, for frack’s sake. The Washington Post reports that Rachael Ray’s catchword EVOO – that’s short for extra-virgin olive oil, for those of you not yet in the know — is to be included in the 2007 edition of the Oxford American College Dictionary.

How many times do I have to say this, people? Save this shite for the Oxford Dictionary of Slang!

OK, this is a good one … from venerated publisher Oxford University Press. Oxford just published a book called Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: A Casebook. Here’s a description of the book in Oxford’s online “Literature Newsletter”:

This book provides a series of essays by Jane Eyre that are lucidly and passionately written, and carefully researched and argued while still being accessible to the general reading public.

Oxford is even better than I thought if they were somehow able to summon one of fiction’s best-loved heroines and convince her to write a series of essays. Go Oxford!

Well, the good folks at Oxford University Press have unveiled The New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2006. And it ain’t anything cute or even elegant.

It’s carbon neutral. I am yawning just typing it. Head to Oxford if you want the definition.

Their reasoning for choosing such a dud? Oxford’s Erin McKean, editor of the OAD, writes:

We know that people love fun, flashy words like truthiness … but we are always looking for a word that is both reflective of the events and concerns of the past year and also forward-looking: a word that we think will only become more used and more useful as time goes on.

OK … I guess.