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Lola Ogunnaike’s description of Lit Lite, a weekly series where performers select and read from their favorite bad books, made me want to check it out. Recent selections include work by Ethan Hawke, Naomi Campbell, and Eve Ensler.

“I am unfortunately one of those lonely sad people that reads a lot,” said [Lit Lite creator] Mr. Hendrix in an interview, “and I’ve always been drawn to bad books.” Asked why he prefers cringe-inducing texts to works from the literary canon Mr. Hendrix said, “Good literature is a little bit boring and precious.” He pointed to Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections” and the works of David Foster Wallace to illustrate his point, saying he would rather curl up with “I Was a White Slave in Harlem,” the autobiography of the drag queen Margo Howard-Howard. Speaking of slavery and drag queens. Originally, Flotilla DeBarge, a statuesque drag queen who bears more than a passing resemblance to the talk show host Star Jones, was to read that evening from “Swan,” a novel by the model Naomi Campbell. Ms. DeBarge and Mr. Hendrix decided that while Ms. Campbell’s book was awful, it was not gripping; instead they opted for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The show’s curators don’t just pick from the fiction shelves–their next selection is the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog (What? It has words?)

Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me fame) is producing a new TV show for the FX network. The reality series, called 30 Days, places people “in unfamiliar social circumstances” for a month and documents their reactions. One of the shows is about a “fundamentalist Christian” who is taken to Dearborn, Michigan for a month. Says Spurlock:

“We took a fundamentalist Christian from my home state of West Virginia, somebody who is very pro-war, pro-‘us versus them’, that when you hear Muslim the only thing he thinks of is a guy standing on a mountain with an AK-47,” Spurlock said.

The man leaves his wife and children at home and goes to live with a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States.

“He dresses as a Muslim, eats as a Muslim, he prays five times a day, he studies the Koran daily, he learns to speak Arabic, he works with an imam, a Muslim cleric, to learn the history of Islam, what are the five pillars, why are they important.”

“And the transformation this guy goes through in 30 days is miraculous, it’s incredible,” Spurlock said.

The documentary maker, who has visited more than 100 schools as part of his campaign to improve school food programs, says the television show is driven by the desire to make people think about societal problems.

Another show has Spurlock and his fiancee trying to survive on minimum wage for a month. Now that I’ll watch. Maybe I’ll set my TiVo.

B.M. Mooyart-Doubleday, who translated The Diary of Anne Frank from the Dutch, gets some recognition via a profile in the Journal Gazette.

For many readers of the diary of the teen hidden in an attic in her father’s office building in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Mooyart-Doubleday and Frank became one and the same – even though the former was hardly an experienced translator of Dutch.

Instead, she was a 31-year-old mother of two who had married a pilot in the Dutch equivalent of the Air Force and moved to Holland, teaching herself the language in the process.

Shortly after the war ended, she recalls, she received a letter from an old friend in London who worked at a small publishing house.

“He said, ‘We have had a man called Otto Frank come to our office telling us about his daughter’s diary, and we think it’s an interesting document, but we have no one in this office who reads Dutch,’ ” she recalls.

“So I jumped on my bicycle and bought the book and read it in one breath, and I was very moved, and I wrote back telling him I thought it was a very good book indeed.”

The book had been published in Dutch as “The Secret Annex” in 1947.

Mooyart-Doubleday received only 60 pounds for the translation, which she had to complete in a little over two months. French and German translations of the book, she says, did not sell initially, but the English translation did well.

The Anne Frank Museum has exhaustive information about her, and you can even take a virtual tour of the house and watch rare footage. By far the most moving moment of my trip to Amsterdam a few years ago was standing on the second floor of the building at 263 Prinsengracht and peeking out at the secret annex where the Frank family hid for two years.

A study of bestselling authors reveals that 50 is the perfect age to write a novel. Actually, that’s kind of misleading. Make that “the perfect age to write a novel that makes it to the NY Times bestseller list, which novel might not be your first, nor your last.” But still. When you compare that to the average age at which musicians top the Rolling Stone list, it’s nice to see that maturity is not a liability in writing.

Bookdwarf reports on Macaulay Culkin’s first novel, which the publisher’s catalog describes thus:

In a dizzying kaleidescope of words and images, actor and writer Macaulay Culkin takes readers on a twisted tour to the darkest corners of his fertile imagination. Part memoir, part rant, part comedic tour de force, Junior is full of hard-won wisdom of Culkin’s quest to come to terms with the awesome pressures of childhood mega-stardom and family dysfunction. He understands that “having fun and being happy are two totally different things,” yet at the same times he warns, “the end of the world is coming—and I’m going to have unfinished business.” Searingly honest and brainteasingly inventive, Junior is breathtaking proof that Culkin has found his own utterly original voice.

Now, I know that catalogs are supposed to indulge in hyperbole about the author’s talent, but “brainteasingly inventive”? “Breathtaking proof”? Time to put down that thesaurus.