One of the people in my
book group picked Jess Walter's
Citizen Vince for our September book. I'm glad, because it's not something I'd likely have picked up on my own, and I liked it. Set in Spokane, Washington during the 1980 election it's a mystery of sorts. It turns out one of my friends from school knows the author from Spokane, so it was fun to hear a bit about him and Spokane. His latest novel,
The Zero, which I haven't read, has been nominated for a National Book Award.
posted by kristin at 10:49 AM
Joe Sacco's Notes from a Defeatist is a collection of short comics on a variety of topics. They're generally not as weighty as
Palestine was (the only other Sacco I'd read). My favorite piece, of course, was the one about working in a library.
posted by kristin at 10:45 AM
Gideon Defoe's
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab is the second book in his series of short silly books about pirates. It shouldn't be hard to figure out who they encounter in this one.
posted by kristin at 10:43 AM
Have you ever wanted to read the
Encyclopaedia Britannica cover to cover? Me neither, except for brief moments while reading A.J. Jacobs's
The Know-It-All. It's a memoir of the year he spent reading the encyclopaedia, so discussions of neat things he reads about are interspersed with comments about getting himself in trouble mentioning them, and lots of talk of his and his wife's attempts to get her pregnant.
posted by kristin at 5:55 PM
Robert Charles Wilson's
Spin was the 2006 Hugo winner. It's big, but has some neat ideas and some interesting characters. Hopefully it's not one of those science fiction books that ends up being predictive.
posted by kristin at 5:52 PM
Michael Crichton's
The Andromeda Strain is one of those classic SF thriller that I'd never gotten around to reading. I probably shouldn't have bothered, but I guess it was ok as a quick read. Definitely not a book for the germ-o-phobe to read. I liked his time trave story,
Timeline, a lot more.
posted by kristin at 5:48 PM
Nicholas Christopher's
Veronica is the second book of his I've read. Like some other novels I've quite liked, it's one of those books where things are set in the everyday world and then weird things happen. I guess that's essentially what magical realism is, but for some reason I've never quite felt comfortable applying the term to books set in the U.S. perhaps because the Latin American settings I normally associate with it already appear a bit magical to me.
The only other book of Christopher's that I've read is
Franklin Flyer which I think I liked better than this one.
posted by kristin at 5:44 PM
Stassen's
Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda is a fairly confusing (but I believe intentionally so) and horrifying look at the Rwandan genocide in graphic form. This comic is anything but comedic.
posted by kristin at 5:41 PM 
