I was having a latte at a coffee house the other day when a young female voice appeared on the house stereo, singing a ballad of love and loss that sounded vaguely familiar. It took a moment to realize the song was "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," and that it was originally written and sung by Bob Dylan on the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks, his vinyl saga of a painful marital breakup. This twentysomething sounded a bit young to have gone through that ordeal, but still, there was something fresh and wistful in her delivery, as if she could see ahead to future heartbreak.

I'll look for you in old Honolulu, San Francisco, Ashtabula

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it now, but when Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was released in the U.S. in 2008, I chose not to buy it, despite all the glowing newspaper reviews and the raves from friends who said it was the equal of Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. I couldn't get my head around the idea of a detective novel set in Sweden, a nation I associated with strong coffee, lingonberry jam and difficult-to-assemble chairs from Ikea rather than grisly crimes, sordid secrets and suspense. After someone loaned me a copy, though, I belatedly enlisted in the legion of Larsson fans who made the late author's three novels -- and the movies based on them, including the current English-language version of Dragon Tattoo with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara -- into an international phenomenon.

But after reading Jan-Erik Pettersson's Stieg Larsson: The Real Story of the Man Who Played With Fire, I no longer feel so foolish. Pettersson informs readers that an acquisitions editor at the Swedish publishing company to whom Larsson initially sent Dragon Tattoo and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, returned the manuscripts unread with a generic rejection letter attached. I'm guessing that unnamed editor has spent a lot of sleepless nights, mentally calculating the bonanza that he or she passed up. (According to Larsson's official website, his books have sold 63 million copies worldwide.)

When I finished reading musician, poet and author Gil Scott-Heron's posthumously published The Last Holiday: A Memoir, I felt all at once exultant and angry, deeply moved and maddeningly frustrated. But mostly I felt an odd, pensive twinge of regret, a bit like the one that I got at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when the two legendary but fading outlaws make one last, fatal charge with their guns blazing.

Like Butch and Sundance, Scott-Heron, who died in May at 62, was a desperado, but he performed his feats of audacious daring with a typewriter and a piano. Even at the peak of his fame, when he was touring with Stevie Wonder in the early 1980s, he never had more than a cult following. Unless you're part of the latter, chances are that you're probably familiar with just his best-known song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," a searing spoken-word take-down of the hypocrisy and phoniness of the Nixon-era mass media, set to a hypnotic funky synergy of electric bass, drums and jazz flute. He wrote this enduring classic at age 19 in 1968.

The term "Bucket List" became part of our lingo after director Rob Reiner released a movie of the same name in 2007. The film depicted two two terminally ill cancer patients -- portrayed by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman -- on a madcap round-the-world race to do all the stuff they'd always wanted to do. Since then, the idea of creating a checklist of things that you aim to accomplish or experience during your lifetime has become a pervasive cultural meme.

That's particularly true for those of us in our forties and fifties, who are just awakening to the realization that we don't want to be like the guy futilely chasing after the sinking sun in that old Pink Floyd song "Time," or like Harry, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro, who who lies dying in a tent in Africa and thinks of all the memories he'd been planning to turn into novels someday, but now never will. (Poor Harry -- if he hadn't been in such a Lost Generation existential funk, he might have realized that he actually had lived a life so rich and full of adventure that a lot of less daring souls would envy him.)

If you're the sort of avid reader who carries around a half-dozen novels and biographies on your iPhone to read in checkout lines (as I do), you've been looking forward to the perennial best-books lists as eagerly as college basketball fans wait for the NCAA tournament brackets to be released.

The lists are both a chance to spot some overlooked gems and to kvetch about what Philistines various critics and publications are for not giving the proper accolades to my particular favorite volumes.

Bing Crosby used to croon about silver bells ringing and "busy sidewalks dressed in holiday style," but a lot of this year's shoppers are only hearing mouse-clicks and the beep of their laptops. According to this Associated Press article, the week that ended Dec. 18 was the busiest seven days of online holiday shopping in history (or at least since the inception of the web in the early 1990s). Shoppers spent a hefty $6.3 billion on Amazon, eBay and other e-commerce sites. That includes $1.04 billion that shoppers spent last weekend, the last full one before the Christmas holiday.

That shopping spree added to the $32 billion that American shoppers have spent online since November, according to the Reston, Va.-based research firm comScore. That represents a robust 15 percent increase over 2010, and analysts are now expecting total holiday online sales to reach $38 billion by the end of December.

It's crunch time. If you're still shopping, here are some helpful last-minute suggestions from SecondAct's 2011 holiday gift guides:

1. Smart Gifts for Techies. Once again, the iPad is dominating holiday lists, but unlike last year, there are some worthy, lower-cost alternatives, including the Kindle Fire. Other hot gadgets include the iPhone 4S, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, big-screen TVs and web-based music services such as Spotify.

Forget art for art's sake. These people -- a jewelry designer, a soap maker and a pair of studio owners -- traded less-fulfilling jobs for occupations that allow them to make a living from their artistic passions.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at their transformations, along with their advice for others who want to pursue an art- or craft-based encore career:

Rich Sandomeno, 40, Los Angeles

30 Rock star Alec Baldwin apparently is the latest middle-aged celebrity to struggle with addiction -- not to booze, pills or sex, but to a game on his smartphone.

The 53-year-old actor was kicked off an American Airlines flight about to depart from Los Angeles this week, when he apparently didn't turn off his electronic device despite an admonition from a flight attendant, as this MSNBC report recounts.

Mike Kravinsky (center) had a pretty good career run with ABC News, working for 29 years as a video editor and technical director for the network's Washington, D.C.-based programs. But in 2010, when he was offered a voluntary buyout, Kravinsky figured it was time to use his visual talents in another medium.

"I'd always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to make a film," he recalls. "But I couldn't think of a good story to tell."