needs more demons?

More than a week later, I’m still not really sure what I think of The Leftovers. In some ways its upper middle class suburban lifestyle satire struck me as thematically similar to Little Children, with the addition of its major background plot element: it takes place after a Rapture-like event caused a significant fraction of [...]

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The first part of Reaves and Perry’s novel is set immediately before the original 1977 Star Wars movie; the second section is set during the time frame of the film, and interleaves most of the scenes set on the Death Star into the new story. (It’s a bit structurally similar to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are [...]

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How much have I been enjoying Peterfreund’s “Secret Society Girl” novels? Not only enough that I bought the concluding volume as soon as it was released, but enough that I didn’t read Tap & Gown until now – because I didn’t want to stop having the last book in the series left to look forward [...]

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Pink is an engaging writer, and I certainly was entertained by and learned useful things from Drive. It examines the difference between extrinsic motivation (e.g., “I want to earn a million by the the time I’m 35″) and intrinsic motivation (e.g., “I want to be the best criminal lawyer in the state.”), and argues, with [...]

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There are a lot of intriguing concepts in The Price of Everything, but I was bothered throughout by logic that seemed sloppy. But on the other hand, I mistrust my judgement a little bit because I had a vehement, irrational, negative emotional reaction to some of the book’s content.
Porter’s key concept is that [...]

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Wow. There are so many things I love about this book. There’s careful prose like this:
Ry’s grandfather, Lloyd, took his first cup of coffee out onto the screened porch, sat down on a glider, and waited in the dark for the birds to start chirping. Between him and the sun, there was a thin bit [...]

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This sequel to Rampant is not the sort of book to make a lot of concessions. The opening scene, in which narrator/hereditary-unicorn-slayer Astrid Llewellyn matter-of-factly harvests her dead prey, serves as a litmus test for Peterfreund’s dark, historically informed take on unicorn legends. I imagine that more than a few gentle souls will decide [...]

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Death from the Skies!’s nine chapters all follow the same pattern: a brief, moderately sensationalized depiction of an astronomical disaster followed by a somewhat more sober discussion of the event, with an emphasis on how likely and/or subject to mitigation it is. The book more-or-less progresses from near-term potential events (like a meteor collision) to [...]

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I’m probably over-thinking my reaction to this book.
Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book [...]

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Here are a few of the things I love about The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To:

When Pierson’s characters talk about bands, the made up names, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, sound so believable I had to use Google to make sure they weren’t real.
This book has the most realistic depiction ever [...]

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