The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

It is my unscientific but educated opinion that most authors are better at short stories than longer works. With full-length narratives, authors are prone to blathering on or cramming in unnecessary details or cluttering the story with extraneous characters. With short stories they are forced to make careful choices about each word and sentence. The [...]

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Northlanders: Sven the Returned, by Brian Wood

“Vikings finally done right!” effuses the cover blurb from Entertainment Weekly (whose reviewers obviously never saw the Viking Kittens doing Led Zeppelin, but I digress). If we understand “Vikings” to mean “violent” and “gritty” and “bleak,” then the Northlanders series succeeds with flying colors…
…or, if we’re going to be literal about it, the Northlanders series [...]

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Hell, by Robert Olen Butler

Welcome to Hell. The toilets are backed up, a new Wal-Mart opened today, and the weather forecast calls for scattered sulfurous fiery storms. There are cockroaches everywhere, but no trees or animals (but they don’t deserve to be here, do they?). There are lots and lots and lots of people—Stalin and Hitler (no surprises there) and [...]

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The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

“You brought a veterinarian into this?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah, the guy was a friend of mine,” said Guy.
“And he provided the goat?”
“Yeah.”
“What about the Hippocratic oath?” I asked.
“What?” said Guy, a little crossly.
“I’m just surprised that a civilian veterinary surgeon would provide a healthy goat so some soldiers could try to stare it to death.” [...]

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid, by Jeff Kinney

Greg Heffley is being forced by his mother to keep a journal (“but if she thinks I’m going to write down my ‘feelings’ in here or whatever, she’s crazy”). Except we really probably ought to call it a diary, since that’s what it says on the cover, despite Greg’s instructions to his mother (“when Mom [...]

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In the Shadow of No Towers, by Art Spiegelman

It has been eight years to the day since America was attacked on September 11, 2001. To commemorate, I’d like to discuss the best piece of 9/11 literature I’ve encountered in those eight years, a nonfiction graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers.
Even if you don’t normally read graphic novels, you [...]

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My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up, by Russell Brand

“Time moves very slowly when you’re standing naked on Hackney Road at three o’clock in the morning. I can hear music from the bar below, and I realize there must be a party with a late license, but I can’t go down there completely naked. Luckily, there’s an umbrella standing up against the door, so [...]

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Death with Interruptions, by José Saramago

On New Year’s Day, in an unidentified country, everyone suddenly stops dying. Disease still strikes, accidents still happen, the elderly get even more so, but everyone just keeps on ticking.
Havoc ensues, but it is very funny havoc, if you go in for dark social satire. The funeral workers are in a tizzy. The government is [...]

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The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, by David Sanger

If you like to sleep soundly at night, satisfied in the knowledge that people are basically decent and that your children will grow up with the freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, permit me to gently nudge you toward Cute Overload, a website that has nothing to do with reading but which [...]

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Identity Crisis, by Brad Meltzer

If, hypothetically, someone completely neglected to read comics in her childhood like she was supposed to, how would this person, now a grownup, become familiar with the superheroes?
Discuss.
I posed this entirely hypothetical question to a geek friend of mine, explaining that the reader, hypothetically, was intimidated by superhero books because she wasn’t familiar with the [...]

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