We interrupt the pounding of pavement to bring you this required summer reading list. The sharp minds at Coudal—swappers of meat, players of layers, and curators of the imagination—asked me and a bunch of other writers to “field-test” books, meaning read a book in a place that inspired it (or sometimes in the place you just happened to be when you picked it up).

Field-Tested Books, then, is a collection of essays written by all those writers about those books and those places. As I alluded to when I visited Charles Bukowski’s apartment back in April, I wrote about his book Women, a field-test that could only take place in Hollywood: Enjoy.

So after you read that, I do suggest you get cracking on the other 60-odd essays, which I think is some of the best writing I’ve seen this side of the internet. But it doesn’t have to be that way! This year, in addition to ordering the beautiful poster by John Solimine, you can order a printed-on-demand Field-Tested Books Book which is made from real pages. My only question is, next time, will someone field-test the Field-Tested Books Book?

Thanks so much to Jim, Steve and the rest of the Chicagoans who made this happen.

Who knew when you combined the OXO vegetable peeler, farfalle pasta and a rump roast it would create a fragrant bouillabaisse infused with literary delight? Last night was the latest of SVA’s D-Crit design criticism reading nights at KGB, presided over by the program chair—and my dear friend—Alice Twemlow. (You can read more about Alice and D-Crit in a new interview at Subtraction.)

Akiko Busch almost brought me to tears with her touching meditation on the OXO vegetable peeler, which she says was created out of an act of tenderness from a industrial designer to his potato-peeling wife. Then the adorable Paola Antonelli read her deconstruction of pasta design, in which she revealed the true beauty of such readings: You can revert to the original version of your piece, without the “nasty edits.” And then Paul Lukas brought down the house with his survey of butcher charts, which included two changes of costume (one, his Meats shirt above; later, a shirt of a cow slicing itself into perfect t-bones) and a packet of expressly prohibited visuals, which included this gem I like to call Meathattan:

I must admit got a little googly eyed being in the room with so many famous design writers. I sat across from the lovely Karrie Jacobs, met Ralph Caplan, saw hot pants-wearing Emilie Baltz from Core77, was surprised to see one of my editors from Fast Company, David Lidsky, and ran into Keira Alexandra (who I first met in Hawaii, of all places). Not to mention all my old and equally famous good friends. Maybe this is just how New York is; a constant state of googly eyes?

Predictably starving, and craving some kind of beef pasta with exquisitely shaved vegetables, we settled on Congee Village where heaping plates of most of the above cost less per-person than some drinks I’ve purchased in Manhattan. From our spoken word appetizers to watermelon wedge desserts laid over a rice-flecked table: It was an extremely satiating night. But I almost debated stopping here on the way home. Burgers Gelato? Talk about a marriage of food and design!

I sat down here today to write an intensely personal post about what it felt like to abandon my apartment after almost four years, which is, by nature, I think, an intensely personal thing to write about. When I moved into this apartment it represented a milestone for me because it was the first place I ever occupied by myself. But it was also the first place where I could confidently call myself a writer. Without running to the toilet and puking.

All of this—and yes, puking, too—is what I wanted to tell you about today. Until I read this article, an intensely personal (and beautifully written) piece about the intensely personal (and often dangerous) world of blogging. Because although I moved out of this apartment this week as a finally-budding writer who had proved herself to be extremely proficient at living on her own for the first time, I suddenly realized I will probably remember my time most here as the period during which I became a blogger.

And it’s funny, the memories I have of this apartment. The most vivid one is what you might call a recurring memory since it happened every single day: Sitting at my desk gnawing chunks out of my hangnails trying to figure out what I could possibly write about to fill my three-plus-posts-a-day quota.

Almost every square-foot of that tiny space has a blogging memory tagged to it; I can read it like a Google Map. I can see myself standing at the kitchen sink the day I plotted a retort to an insanely mean email while steel-wooling a baking sheet to a mirror-like shine. Staring at the bumps in the wall of my bedroom in the middle of the night, fretting over a horrifying assumption I’d typed with glee earlier that day. Freaking out as I soaped up my hair in the shower, convinced that last post I moved to ‘publish’ went too far. (It did.)

During those six short steps from my bed to the computer every morning I would consider the day’s two, and only two, possible scenarios: That oxygen-to-the-brain rush when the right people noticed how freaking awesome I wrote, or the chest-crushing low of getting a post dead stupid wrong. That daily twinge, that familiar nausea, will forever haunt the corners of those four rooms for me.

Now I can appreciate the irony. It was a place where, for once, I lived completely by myself. But at the same time, I willingly tossed myself out into the open, every single day, for everyone to see.

What is probably my most favorite article I’ve ever written was published in the LA Times on the same day I took a flight home to St. Louis. I waltzed from vendor to vendor in the American Airlines terminal, pausing to admire the various shelving systems upon which the LA Times was displayed. While all my copies of the piece were filed like federal documents in my carry-on, it was amazing to see hundreds more copies stacked haphazardly in every store, awaiting their readers. After I took my seat in the waiting area I squirmed with delight as the man across from me opened the Calendar section and totally read my piece! But that was nothing compared to the swelling of my chest a few minutes later when he got up and threw it away!

It’s an awesome feeling to know your words are so widely distributed that they’ve become, well, disposable.

Such is the humbling nature of today, when I have four pieces published in the LA Weekly’s annual People issue. Except that the LA Weekly is free. It’s so free that for the next week, LA Weeklys will fall over the city like a light dusting of snow. My stories will be abandoned on bus seats, stuffed between Champagne flutes in moving boxes, wrapped around a dozen pink tulips at the farmers’ market.

So think of me sporting this wide, goofy grin when you come cross an LA Weekly this week. But before you use it to Windex your car windshield, be sure to read my pieces on Mathew Cullen and Javier Jimenez of Motion Theory; Ben Goldhirsh of GOOD; Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of various Awesome Shows, Great Job; and Jonathan Wells of Flux.

And please recycle.

A gorgeous spread in this month’s Vanity Fair peeks inside Bob Dylan’s brain, cataloging everything covered on his Theme Time Radio Hour show from Artists He Plays to Television Shows Referenced to his Recipes (Saltines in the Perfect Meatball? Brilliant!). And, in tiny type that you can’t see above, author Duff McDonald offers proper attribution in the form of his deepest apologies to the one person who is referenced the most: this guy.

You can view the spread larger at VF.com.