I have mixed feelings about Sam Leith’s novel, The Coincidence Engine. The basic plot is that there’s this genius/madman mathematician named Nicolas Banacharski, who may or may not have started trying to find the mathematical proofs for an “engine” that would make the highly improbable/impossible, possible. Naturally, what exactly has happened to him is shrouded […]

Maybe it’s in the water here. I mean, mostly I’ve read that Los Angeles water is filled with parasites and toxins, but maybe it’s actually filled with a desire to spend one’s life eating strangely colored smoothies based on a vegan, plant-based, raw diet. I don’t know. Anyway, about two months after my move to […]

The Rook is a novel that I FRICKIN’ LOVE!!! (I refuse to apologize for the capslocks. I am not ashamed. This is the strength of my love). It took me 3 days to finish… but only because people insisted that I put it down to do unimportant things like … sleep, and eat, and go […]

Young adult romance is an art form like any other, and despite the lack of respect it often gets from mainstream audiences, it is certainly capable of being just as awesome as any other genre. What I’m saying is that just because it looks like Twilight and kind of smells like Twilight, doesn’t mean it […]

 

Arcadia is Lauren Groff’s second novel and it’s wonderful. I read Groff’s first novel, The Monster’s of Templeton, years ago, and I liked it quite a bit. But I love Arcadia more. The book’s about Bit—the first-born child of a hippie commune called Arcadia—and his life (in Arcadia and Outside, as a child and an […]

A.J. Jacobs likes to use his life, body, and family as a template for thoughtful experiments on a myriad of issues. His past two, bestselling books were The Know It All, in which he attempted to read the entire encyclopedia from A to Z, and The Year of Living Biblically, in which he decided to […]

Ask yourself: Do you like action-packed, quick-moving stories? Do you like stories with multiple dimensions/universes and/or the occult? Do you like detectives? Do you like ghosts? Do you like comic books? Do you like portraits of fascinating, fragmented people? Do you like awesomeness? If the answer to most/all of these questions is “yes,” then this […]

You know what I love? Books. You know what else I love? Free stuff. You know what my favorite things in the whole world are (other than harsher punishments for parole violators, Stan… aaaand…  World Peace)? FREE BOOKS Project Gutenberg is the first producer of free ebooks and it’s AWESOME. No, really, it’s one of […]