Staff Picks
June 27, 2011
The Beauty I Long For: Maira Kalman and the Principles of Uncertainty 4
by Emily St. John Mandel
Her books are quirky, deeply moving, and beautiful documents of life on earth. She considers Spinoza, George Washington, fruit platters, her dog, the nature of war. If this sounds incoherent, it isn’t. “I am trying to figure out two very simple things,” she said once at a TED conference. “How to live, and how to die. Period. That’s all I’m trying to do, all day long.”
June 24, 2011
Staff Pick: Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine 2
by Anne K. Yoder
Following in the wake of Moravagine’s violence and abandon is also a vicarious thrill for the reader; the book’s prose and pacing and bravado is fearsome, irresistibly so.
May 27, 2011
Staff Picks: Richard P. Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces 4
by Janet Potter
This is not really physics for beginners, then, but extremely advanced physics explained conversationally, so that students with a working knowledge of the sciences will be intrigued and inspired by the majestic complexity of the discipline, even if they can’t grasp it yet.
May 17, 2011
Staff Pick: China Mieville’s Embassytown 8
by Bill Morris
Instead of doing the safe thing and revisiting his imaginary world of Bas-Lag or his reconfigured city of London, Mieville now takes us to his titular “city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe.”
April 14, 2011
Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels 12
by Emily St. John Mandel
The most recent books I’ve read in the genre confirm my long-held suspicion that attempting to categorize books by genre does readers a disservice; these books are no less literary than any of the other great books I’ve read this year, they just have crimes and/or guns in them.
March 31, 2011
Staff Pick: The Patterns of Paper Monsters by Emma Rathbone 7
by Edan Lepucki
I longed for a contemporary novel about contemporary life. I longed for references to malls, and to boners, and to “intense cell phones” and to a pillow made of denim with an actual jeans pocket on the front, “like it thinks it’s Bruce Springsteen.”
