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.

With the advent of new technology, DNA testing has become more popular not only with crime-fighters, but also with people who want to trace their family lineage.

With a swab of the inside of your cheek, you can learn where your original ancestors hailed from and the migration paths they followed. And National Geographic's Genographic Project, a multiyear study, has helped thousands of people from around the world take DNA tests to help show the ancestral connections we all share.

For birdwatchers like me, one of the highlights of the holiday season is the National Audubon Society's annual Christmas Bird Count. It's a chance for experienced birders to monitor the health of their local avian community, but it's also an opportunity for would-be birdwatchers to get a taste of a fascinating hobby while participating in one of the world's oldest "crowd science" efforts.

In this 112-year-old tradition -- started as an alternative to Christmas bird-shooting competitions -- groups of bird lovers head out one day between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5 to record the number of species and the number of birds they see. Last year more than 60,000 people tallied more than 61 million birds, according to the Audubon Society.

While there still are some holdouts who grumble that books can only be truly appreciated when they're printed on paper, many of the forty- and fifty-somethings I know seem to be increasingly enamored of e-books and portable devices for reading them.

According to this Mashable.com report, people over 45 now own more than half of all e-reader devices, and those age 55 and older are the largest single age demographic, owning 29 percent of them. For middle-aged readers, the devices have at least one significant plus: You readily can adjust the type size to one that your eyes are comfortable with, or even pick a different font. (Here's a great 2010 Minneapolis Star Tribune article in which older readers -- including a poet with limited vision in one eye -- talk about how the technology has made reading more pleasant for them.)

We were all diverted from Occupy Wall Street protests, the Penn State sex abuse scandal, verbal miscues by various presidential hopefuls and other tumultuous events this week by even more shocking news: Brad Pitt, the 47-year-old preternaturally youthful-looking leading man of Moneyball and scores of other films, expects to be through as a movie star by the time he's 50.

Pitt told an Australian TV program that he envisions giving up acting in three years and transitioning into becoming a movie producer. While Pitt is best known for appearing in 65 films, he's also had an off-camera producing role on 20 films, including some in which he didn't appear. "I am really enjoying the producing side and development of stories and putting those pieces together," he explains. "And getting stories to the plate that might have had a tougher time otherwise." Here's a transcript and video of the interview.

It looked like a Hollywood disaster of The Poseidon Adventure proportions when Eddie Murphy backed out of hosting the 2012 Academy Awards, but then came word that his replacement will be veteran Oscars host Billy Crystal.

The 61-year-old Crystal's return engagement promises a contrast to the 2011 telecast, in which Gen Y movie stars James Franco and Anne Hathaway were a little too self-consciously hip and not quite funny enough, according to the critical consensus. As Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich opines: "It's almost as if the show has been going through a midlife crisis -- buying a shiny new car, dating people young enough to be its grandchildren -- and now it's admitting that, well, sometimes the safe choice is the best choice."