needs more demons?

I read Bleeding Violet on Justine Larbalestier’s recommendation, and it strikes me that it has some common elements with Larbalestier’s (très nifty) “Magic” series: both feature estranged families struggling towards reconcilation and less than wholly sane characters. Reeves also eschews standard supernatural fare (vampires, zombies, et al) in favor of inventing a mythos that draws [...]

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I learned of Blood Waters from Bryan Talbot’s fascinating graphic novel* Alice in Sunderland. I was hopelessly intrigued by the book’s genesis: Brenchley produced it in the role of “crimewriter-in-residence on the St Peter’s Riverside Sculpture Project in Sunderland, 1993-94.”
The 10 stories in Blood Waters nominally seem like they ought to fit among the [...]

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I wasn’t familiar with the Bike Snob NYC blog before reading this book, but they share a breezy, sardonic style. Readers of the blog will probably appreciate the book (and vice versa). As the pseudonym implies, the snob is fiercely opinionated. I imagine most cyclists will find themselves thinking “heck, yeah!” and “no, you moron!” [...]

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Braun’s lucid, entertaining, and informative book is evenly split between discussion of two molecules, ethyl alcohol and caffeine, and how they behave in the human body (particularly the brain). Despite its subtitle, it’s much longer on “science” than on “lore,” but Braun doesn’t assume any particular background in organic or neuro-chemistry; Buzz is readily accessible [...]

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Darnielle’s entry on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality in the 33 1/3 series of books about albums uses the device of a teenager’s diary entries to explore the record. (There’s nothing that specifically identifies the diarist as the kid in The Mountain Goats song “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” but it sure sounds [...]

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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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The least of the essays* in The Braindead Megaphone are “merely” entertaining and informative, even enlightening. But the best, with “The United States of Huck” at the top of the pile, are flat-out magnificent: beautifully clear-headed thinking, elegantly expressed, and driven by a passionate need to make the world a better, more humane, place. (The [...]

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I wanted to read The Book of Lost Things even though I disliked Connolly’s The Gates. I had an intuition that The Gates was a less well-developed book, maybe even rushed a bit to capitalize on the market created by The Book of Lost Things.
And I was right — The Book of Lost Things is [...]

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The phrase that kept coming to my mind to describe Boneshaker while I was reading it was “purely awesome.” The back cover copy gives away a little too much of the setup for my taste, but I will say that it shifts between being a steampunk adventure story and a gritty, claustrophobic zombie novel so [...]

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A Brother’s Price is a fantasy novel with a nifty feminist twist: it’s set in a world where male children are much rarer than female children. Spencer posits that this leads to a matriarchal society in which men are valuable chattel — or, in other words, occupy a similar role to women in the vaguely [...]

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