needs more demons?

Real journalists have to turn in their year’s best lists to be published in the month of December, a practice which invariably makes me cringe. “What,” I always think to myself, “if in the dregs of the year* you hear/see/read something amazing that demands you re-order the list?” And it happens from time to time. [...]

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I’m keen to read Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!! and I thought I should probably acquaint myself with Stevenson’s classic first, to catch any references there might be. I’d never read any Stevenson before; his prose was a bit richer than I was expecting, with some evocative and economical descriptions, particularly of his harsh and unlovely [...]

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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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DeNiro’s first novel (following a well-received string of short stories) presents a transformed near-future America: the nation is beset by anachronistic invaders, ravaged by a mysterious plague, and technology stops working. DeNiro pulls off the neat trick of making his surreal world feel internally consistent, largely because it’s grounded by the narrative voice of Macy, [...]

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Strange but true: I never read any E. E. “Doc” Smith before. (It was Michael Kaminski’s assertion in The Secret History of Star Wars that Smith’s Lensmen were a key influence on Lucas’s Jedi Knights that convinced me to take the plunge; mostly I hadn’t read the Lensmen books because I thought I knew exactly [...]

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In The Third Lynx, Zahn again puts agent Frank Compton (from Night Train to Rigel) through some of the classic noir detective paces in his unusual near-future setting, which prominently features interstellar trains. (One of several tropes Zahn explores this time around is the detective who finds himself unexpectedly a murder suspect; there are also [...]

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I loved this book almost unreservedly — it’s easily one of the 5 or 6 best novels I’ve read so far this year. The title is very literally descriptive: it’s the chronicle of Henry and Clare’s relationship. Henry jumps around in time (involuntarily, sometimes forward, mostly backward, mostly within his own lifespan); Clare moves linearly [...]

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Translated with an introduction by Richard Pevear
I’m no literary critic; I’m read The Three Musketeers primarily because I recently saw Slumdog Millionare, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to read books a little farther afield from my usual choices.
But for whatever it’s worth, here are my impressions.
Initially I found The Three Musketeers an [...]

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I’m a big fan of artistic constraints as tools to help channel creativity, so much so that I often look at other people’s work and wonder what constraints they might have applied in its creation. In the case of Tinker, I can’t help but wonder if Spencer deliberately set out to write a fantasy employing [...]

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Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me has an impressive list of contributors with ties to institutions that I think are almost objectively funny and trenchant: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Mr. Show, The Onion, even McSweeney’s. It even includes a pair of essays by guys in bands I almost like.
So I feel [...]

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