The Written Nerd

Shop Indie Bookstores Personal Days by Ed Park (Random House) (Bonus: Terrifyingly timely!) Joshua Ferris' highly acclaimed novel Then We Came To The End demonstrated that actual literature can happen in cubicle land. The funny and charming Ed Park (co-editor of The Believer ) takes it a step further with Personal Days : structural innovation, wordplay, paranoia and misdirection... applied to the realm of random firings, arbitrary protocols, dumb nicknames, and potential romance that define contemporary office life. Kafka, Nabokov, and yes, Dwight Schrute would feel right at home. While I'm not sure which group will be publishing Personal Days after the Black Wednesday shufle in publishing, the terrors of corporate life were never more apparent, nor more in need of a dose of irreverence. Courage and good cheer to our colleagues on the publishing side -- may you be able to laugh, albeit ruefully, at the vagaries of the Company, and not wait until your laptop battery is dy...

Shop Indie Bookstores Life Sucks by Jessica Abel (First Second Books) (Bonus: not Twilight !) Far be it from me to knock the biggest moneymaker since Harry Potter , but I guess I prefer my vampires a little less beautiful and a little more clever. Why should vampires, if they existed in the modern world, look like Gothic lotharios? Why couldn't they look like, for example, a hapless all-night convenience store clerk in California, hopelessly infatuated with a non-vampire Goth chick, who's swept away in turn by a surfer jerk (who is also a vampire)? "Buffy meets Clerks" is a pretty good description of this book, which is smart and funny enough to satisfy the smart-ass teen (with a heart of gold) in all of us. The clever Jessica Abel and the talented Warren Pleece make this one of my favorite comics of the year, and a go-to recommendation for YA readers and adults alike.

Shop Indie Bookstores The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer (Bonus: super-nice author!) This novel is the kind of classic tragic romance that immerses you in a beautiful fog, just like the San Francisco of Greer's 1953 story. It's as much about war as about love: about the consequences of opting out, as well as the conflict itself. Like Greer's masterpiece The Confessions of Max Tivoli , it keeps surprising you, with revelations like little explosions along the way. And Greer's power of language and emotional heft are literally second to none. Read this with caution-- you'll emerge as if from a black-and-white movie matinee, blinking in the light. And here's a little book geek-out story: a few years ago I was working at Three Lives bookstore and writing reviews for Publishers Weekly for a little extra cash. One of the books that showed up at my door was The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and knowing nothing about it I fell utterly in love with the book ...

Shop Indie Bookstores The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (Knopf) (Bonus: favorite fun reading) I am so glad Steve and Jenn insisted I would love this book -- as you may recall, I got a little obsessed . I think the pink-and-green fuzzy cover was a poor choice, and I wish this book had had better marketing. But I suspect these mistakes occurred because no one knows quite what to do with Harkaway's genre-bending opus -- it's hard to say whether it's the next Good Omens or the next For Whom The Bell Tolls . What you need to know is that it's about the end of the world, and the terrible danger of people who allow themselves to become cogs in the machines of governments or companies, and the difficulties of growing up into yourself. It also has pirates, ninjas, explosions, young love, longing, conspiracies, politics, monsters, heroes, and British humor at its finest since P.G. Wodehouse. Normal people (not just me) who read this book are getting obsessed with it. ...

Shop Indie Bookstores Incognegro by Mat Johnson (Bonus: December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month ! ) My favorite kind of book is one that both moves and challenges me, taking me on a thrill ride of story and character. Mat Johnon’s new graphic novel rides that dangerous edge between heavy issues and heavy-hitting action, with the story of a black man passing for white in the lynching-plagued 1930s South. It pulls it off in the way only a comic can (and a black and white comic at that), and manages to work gender politics, family dynamics, and some darned funny dialogue into a suspenseful mystery. An important (and enjoyable) moment in the history of literary comics. And then there's the bonus: African American author Carleen Brice is hoping to use this month of gift giving to start a movement to get some classics and new favorites out of the "African American Literature" section and into the hands of non-black readers. ...

Ah, the Friday after Thanksgiving... lucky for me I have the day off, and no shopping to do (all my Christmas gifts come from the bookstore), and can bask in the indolence of it all. It's a good day to catch up a little and think ahead a little, and some of the best-of lists have made me want to take a look at my own reading for the year. The New York Times has done a clever thing : in addition to their usual "official" lists of the Top 100 and the Top 10 Books of 2008, they 've had their regular book reviewers pick their favorite books of the year. Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin both list their own personal top 10 here -- the only thing I wish is that they'd talk about why they loved these, rather than just including clips from their Times review. I recently took a look at various lists of my own reading (our store staff picks, my little notebook, my Goodreads page, etc.) and compiled them, and somehow I seem to have read over 75 books so far this year. ...

Review of an imaginary book As I was delaying getting out of bed this morning, I had one of those weird morning dreams. I was reading a YA comic book about a boy and a girl who were left in the woods for dead. They somehow returned to civilization with a mutant superpower: if you got too near them you sickened and died. But it worked very slowly, so for most people it just manifested as a faint nausea. Then the boy and the girl became rockstars (apparently inducing nausea added to their mystique), and played a kick-ass show in which one of them played a Smashing Pumpkins song and the other simultaneously played some hip hop anthem, producing a harmonious chaos. As the kids were both either black or Latino, it was in a weird way a positive depiction of teens of color, influenced perhaps by Ivan Velez' Dead High Yearbook , and maybe by the animated comic (the ALP says "We used to just call it 'cheap animation'") in the extras of the Hellboy 2 DVD I watched last...