With any luck, I'll be in a new apartment before long, which will allow me to do one of my very favorite things -- rearrange my books. I've never felt quite at home in my current place, so the books are scattered everywhere, many still in boxes from when I moved in.

When I was younger and had fewer books, I was an alphabetical organizer. Then I moved to grouping them by subject -- fiction, poetry, science, biography, movies -- and left it at that. But in recent years, while working in some aspect of publishing, my collection has grown to the point where it resists almost any type of organization. This upsets my inner Felix Unger. It also leads me back to basic questions of how many books to keep and where to keep them.

I think my modest goal will be to return to a subject-oriented layout. For now, I will resist the urge to lose my mind and, say, organize them using the Dewey Decimal system!

You won't know the answer to the title's question when you've finished What is Life? by Ed Regis, but, if you haven't already read deeply in this philosophical/scientific subject, you will learn a lot from the author's concise presentation of various efforts to define biological existence and create life. The most intellectually compelling part of what is basically a long essay is the author's analysis of man's own efforts to make living physical--well, things--out of inanimate ingredients. But the central mystery remains as mysterious as ever--in my opinion there will never be an answer (as there will never be an answer to "What is consciousness?"). And so maybe the song lyric--"just a bowl of cherries"--is ultimately no worse a response than all the research in the world might provide.

"She liked to look. She might recoil from violence, but she was drawn to its aftermath. When others wanted to look away, she'd want to look more closely. Wounded and dead bodies fascinated her." This is what Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review, and collaborator with Errol Morris in the making of the movie and book Standard Operating Procedure, tells us about Specialist Sabrina Harman--the MP who took many of the infamous pictures at Abu Ghraib. Those pictures, and the stories told through interviews with the soldiers who participated in the humiliation and, yes, torture at that prison, are the basis of the book and the movie.

What interests me is how much more immediate and inflected and human Gourevitch's writing is than I found the movie, filled with "re-creations," to be. Gourevitch, who has prominently taken some issue with the idea of "objective" journalism, writes in a way that without being polemical tells you exactly where he stands. At its best, it transcends outrage and achieves a kind of surreal bafflement about this notorious and shameful episode in our history.

Norm Geras in the UK takes part in a silly but fun task making the rounds: Pick up the nearest book; open to page 123; find the fifth sentence; post the next three sentences.

My nearest book is Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis, and here are the sentences:

"It's not healthy, locking yourself away in here so you can eat pies and read all these monstrous books with f's for s's. Not a wholesome life, Lamar. I want to talk to you about Miss Hine and a new arrangement."

You're supposed to tag five other bloggers to participate, but I'll just tag everyone instead. If you care to share, visit the comments section below.