The highly useful Web site Metacritic has finally added a Books section. The editors -- who gather and present loads of reviews of films, CDs, and games in order from thumbs up to a flipped bird -- write:

"Thanks to the many hundreds of you who have written in over the years pleading with us to add coverage of books to our site, we now have just that. We are pleased to launch our new Metacritic Books section with a database of approximately 150 books drawn from the second half of 2004. To start, we plan on adding to our database by, on average, about one new book a day, and if all goes well, we'll pick up the pace a bit next year."

The pickings are slim, as the section only opened w/in the past month. Like the other works that are listed, books will be given a Metascore, "a weighted average of all of the scores assigned by individual critics." The novels currently leading by score in the fiction category: Alice Munro's "Runaway" (92), Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning "The Line of Beauty" (89), and Haruki Murakami's "Kafka on the Shore" (88).

While on the topic of Murakami. I was not a fan of his novel "South of the Border, West of the Sun," which seemed to me wooden and cheesy. (I think this has at least something to do w/ the fact that while I was reading it, I saw the films "Yi-Yi" and "In the Mood for Love," which were hitting somewhat similar notes much more beautifully.) But after reading Murakami's extraordinary and spooky story "Ice Man" (The New Yorker, 2/03), I'm ready to give him another shot.

Lastly, two nuggets discovered from "John Steinbeck: An American Writer," which I watched a few nights ago. First, after being married for several years, he stayed for a bit in Hollywood and fell for a young woman in her twenties. They took up w/ each other. After a bit of time, both this young woman and Steinbeck's wife -- not psyched about this situation -- told the novelist they were pregnant. (Both were lying.) Steinbeck brought his new young love back to his and his wife's home, introduced them, and said: I don't know what to do. You two fight it out.

And the second nugget: Steinbeck's word for critics? "Lice." Awesome.