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I'm sure that some people would read these lines (and many others in the book) and think the narrator is deliberately being dispassionate, and that that is part of the point. And maybe it is. But I don't think he is particularly stiff or even cold. (For stiffness that feels very novelistic, read Ishiguro's butler narrative, The Remains of the Day.) I don't even think he's really much of a narrator, exactly, but is instead a very modest, disembodied sensibility trying to stay out of the way and just show what life is like in a place that most outsiders know little about.

And maybe, really, this isn't a novel at all. Maybe it is a collection of fiction. I generally don't understand it when a writer says "the town is a character" in his or her book. But in the case of Every Day is For the Thief, Lagos has been injected with more character than the narrator, who prefers not to call attention to himself, but instead to slip along, practically unnoticed, and take poignant snapshots of the strange and singular city around him. The separate sections of this book don't read like chapters, exactly, and they don't gather force, though they are consistently engaging and interesting.

So is the novel worth escaping from? Is it sort of a cushy and familiar prison for writers? There are times when perhaps all novelists, myself included, feel afraid that without knowing it they are making their work more conventional in order to accommodate that old "and then she said this to him, and then this happened" nature of the form. It's probably a good idea to deliberately get outside of that once in a while.

Maybe, for Teju Cole, an eloquent writer who seems to be perfecting an on-the-move and not entirely categorizable subtype of fiction, the idea of writing a traditional novel feels about as exciting as spending a night trapped in darkness and unremitting heat.

Read an excerpt of Every Day Is for the Thief

It has been 102 years since it was written on board the Titanic, describing a pleasant Sunday spent on the cruise ship that was headed for disaster. The letter fetched 119,000 pounds (about $200,000) at auction in England Saturday, surpassing expectations by $30,000.

"Well, the sailors say we have had a wonderful passage up to now," the letter from a passenger to her mother reads in part. "There has been no tempest, but God knows what it must be when there is one."

The unique artifact is believed to be the the only surviving letter written aboard the doomed ship on April 14, the day the Titanic hit an iceberg. More than 1,500 people lost their lives when the ship sank.

From London, Larry Miller reports for NPR's Newscast unit:

"The letter on Titanic stationary was written by survivors Esther Hart and her 7-year-old daughter, Eva, eight hours before the Titanic hit a North Atlantic iceberg and sank.

"Addressed to Hart's mother in England, she wrote they were enjoying the wonderful journey, that she was over her sea sickness, that she had gone to church service that Sunday morning and enjoyed the hymns.

"She wrote the ship was moving so fast they'd be arriving in New York early. The letter survived because it was in the pocket of her husband's coat, which he gave her to keep warm before the Titanic sank. While mother and daughter made it to a lifeboat, Hart's husband went down with the ship.

"Also at the auction: a Titanic second-class menu and a metal plate from a lifeboat."

People are storing more and more stuff online: photos, music, personal documents — even books. The business of cloud storage is growing 30 percent a year, Forrester Research says. But if you're storing your digital belongings in the cloud, you should know you're giving up some rights.

A year ago, I talked to Kyle Goodwin about one of those scary computer moments — he was saving important videos from his business to an external hard drive.

"Right in the middle of a save, I knocked it off my coffee table and it hit the floor and it's destroyed," he said.

Goodwin was flipping out. The core of his business was taking videos of high school sports events and selling highlights back to the families of the players. Six months of work was on that hard drive. But he had a moment of relief when he remembered he had backups in the cloud. So, he went to look at his storage website.

All Tech Considered

Searching The Planet To Find Power For The Cloud

Here's a measure of Maryland's Democratic tilt: Even an epic failure in launching the state's health care website isn't enough to derail the political fortunes of the official responsible for it. The Affordable Care Act is that popular.

Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, who was assigned by Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley in 2010 to oversee the health care law's rollout in Maryland, remains the Democratic front-runner in the June 24 primary. His still-formidable standing is a testament to his political talent, but also to his chief rival's tendency for self-inflicted damage.

Doug Gansler, Maryland's attorney general, has made Brown's alleged managerial incompetence a central theme of his campaign. To further his point about Brown's managerial chops, Gansler earlier this week did something rare in American politics — he trivialized a veteran's military service.

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