Is this what it’s like to watch the Home Shopping Network? Somebody comes on screen and talks about a new kind of soap or a wondrously diamondesque piece of jewelry and you just can’t help yourself? Like a person possessed, you pick up the phone or the keyboard and the transaction’s complete before you know what happened. I don’t know for sure—I’ve never watched much shopping-specific television, but I do know that I keep buying the books because of pleasant, smiling people I see on television. That sounds like how HSN and QVC are supposed to work, right?

I’m a terrible impulse buyer, especially when it comes to books. In the old days, I would find it almost physically impossible to walk out of a bookstore without something, at least a magazine. For a while though, I thought I’d overcome this uncontrollable desire for the printed word. As I noted a few weeks back, I’d broken the cycle of buying thanks to switching over to e-books, mostly through Amazon’s Kindle App on my phone and various tablet devices. For me, coming away with some downloaded free samples scratched that itch for new words.

But I recently looked at my list of actual e-book purchases and found that I’d become subject to a new source of temptation—the teasing, seductive power of a five-minute interview with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. I’ve long been impressed by the fact that authors make up such a large percentage of the guests on both shows. Not only are they authors, but they’re not usually particularly famous ones. Instead, Stewart and Colbert highlight books that are either new and relevant to the news of the day or just plain fascinating in some way. The short, humorous conversations key in on the most interesting elements of the books, and the authors usually have just enough time to make their case and whet my appetite for more. Sometimes I download the sample, just like in the store, but there’s a special power seeing the author live has over me. If I feel a connection, I want to support them, I want to buy the book.

My son is not biracial—not in the true sense of the word. He’s only a quarter Indian, just enough to have my dark eyes and hair, and hopefully some facility with Hindi. Chances are, he won’t marry an Indian, though it’s possible he’ll fall for someone half-Indian, or quarter Indian, as mixed race couples become more and more the norm. Mir is, instead, what photographer Kip Fulbeck (Part Asian 100% Hapa) refers to as multiracial in his book, Mixed: Portraits of Multiracial Kids.

Books about multiracial kids are not the norm; biracial characters are still new to the young adult section, let alone the picture book one. And yet, in just two weeks, I’ve stumbled on two kid-appropriate books about growing up mixed, with two entirely different takes on the matter.

The first, Fulbeck’s Mixed, is primarily a photo book, the sort of thing you might expect to see in on a coffee table in an all-beige room filled with high end, also beige, furniture. It’s light on commentary, though the foreword by Maya Soetoro Ng, half-sister to President Obama, does give some useful context to the importance of a book about mixed race kids (and certainly more than the perfunctory afterword by Cher).

If you know who James Frey is, you probably have an opinion about him. Most famous for being raised up to best-selling heights before then being cast down into disrepute, Frey is the author of the fictional “memoir” A Million Little Pieces. He’s since apologized for lying and then apologized for apologizing, maintaining that the line between “truth” and “fiction” is ever fungible and other self-aggrandizing justifications in the name of art. Opinions will vary about Frey, depending on your perspective and priorities, but one thing is certain: despite the biggest public shaming in recent literary history, James Frey has not quietly shuffled off-stage, never to be heard from again. He’s still around, and he’s still playing fast and loose with both the truth and people’s dreams.

At this point I encourage you to click on this link to New York Magazine and read a long, fascinating piece by Suzanne Mozes about her experiences with Frey’s new puppy mill style publishing initiative. To summarize briefly (but you should read it!), Frey has started this thing called Full Fathom Five, where he solicits ideas from writers, asks them to deliver whole novels for an insulting $250 fee, and promises them a theoretically generous cut of any profits from publication, movie rights, and merchandise. He also gets the right to take the author’s name off it, make any changes he wants, forbid the author from talking about it, and he refuses the author any right to audit the books in a quest for said promised profits. Frey’s hunting for victims in MFA programs, filling the eyes of writers hungry for publication with dreams of Hollywood and big checks.

My local Barnes & Noble is full of warm memories for me. I remember when it was built. For a while in the ‘90s, I worked there part time. I’ve gone on dates there, signed my own books there, and whiled away many aimless hours there. It’s part of my routine, a thing to do when I need something to do. I’m probably in there once a week, certainly anytime I go by the adjacent Best Buy to pick up a new video game (which is also about once a week). But I honestly don’t quite remember the last time I bought something besides coffee there. Certainly it’s been months. I’ve become a loyal browser, but a bad customer.

I’ve owned and used an e-reader since the original Sony Reader back in 2006. At that point the selection was small and the hardware mediocre. Then I switched to Kindle when the second version came out, by which time selection had improved a great deal and the hardware was getting nice. Now I’m reading 90% of my books on my Ipad, mostly through Amazon’s Kindle app. Those books I’m reading synch up with my Android phone, so I’m never without the titles I’m currently engrossed in (usually two or three at a time). At this point, I don’t buy paper books if I can help it. The lone exception are art and photography books, but those make up a tiny fraction of my buying habits.

Dystopic fiction is nothing new. According the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used (created of his own free will) by philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1868. Mill used the word in a speech to the British House of Commons, denouncing the Irish Land Act (“What is commonly called Utopian is something too good to be practicable; but what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable.”). Since then, dystopias have become a staple in fiction, cycling through literary, science fiction, and fantasy. The current YA dystopic trend may signal the end of of dystopias as a wandering subgenre—perhaps even bringing them into the mainstream.