The Written Nerd

Shop Indie Bookstores Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow (Harper) (bonus: great literary genre writing!) Today is the ALP' s birthday! In honor of the occasion, I'm posting the one book that he and I both read this year, which we also both loved. As I noted here : "My enthusiasm for the book led to a paragraph-long staff pick [the link now busted since we switched names and websites]. The ALP was inspired to write an exploration of experimentation in genre fiction using metaphors from evolutionary theory . I kid you not." I can't find my original staff pick at the moment, but I encourage you to read the ALP's review if you're interested in a meditation on the place of this book in the surging battle lines of literary and genre fiction. Or, you could just read Sharp Teeth . You won't find a more engaging, suspenseful, character-driven novel in verse about werewolf tribes in Los Angeles published this year. Seriously, it's a form perfectly suited to i...

The ALP and I rarely read the same books. This is both practical (because we talk about everything we read, it's like reading twice as much) and a matter of taste (mine tend toward mainstream-ish literary fiction, his toward the weirder ends of the spectrum, from tales of con men to experimental novels to mass-market horror. Go fig.) But there is occasionally some overlap, often with books that fit into more than one category. One recent example was Toby Barlow's werewolf-novel-in-free-verse, Sharp Teeth . (Check out the very cool animations on the book's website -- props to HarperCollins for a job well done). We were both intrigued. My enthusiasm for the book led to a paragraph-long staff pick . The ALP was inspired to write an exploration of experimentation in genre fiction using metaphors from evolutionary theory . I kid you not. And it's good reading. My boy's wicked smart. What's your relationship to books and your loved ones? All the same books, ...