WHY WE BROKE UP, Daniel Handler and Maira Kalman: i really dug this one — it felt like a bit like being in a time machine back to high school. which was a mildly uncomfortable and awkward experience (much like high school itself), but vivid and entertaining nonetheless.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, John le Carre: well sheeeeit. the movie is coming out so i figured i would finally get around to this one. have read other le Carre and very much enjoyed, of course, but this one has me on absolute tenterhooks. am trying REALLY HARD not to look at the cast list on imdb (i haven’t seen any trailers) lest i prejudice my inner movie of the book. at the moment George Smiley is a moustache-less Jim Broadbent, Ricki Tarr is a young Crispin Glover at his smarmiest, and Prideaux is a sort of grizzled cross between Gerard Butler and Daniel Pirrie (actor who plays the asshole soldier who gets Ethel pregnant on Downton Abbey). just in case you were wondering.

“….. and then the general hard-to-believe expensiveness of everything in London, restaurants and shoes and parking fines and cinemas tickets and gardeners and the feeling that every time you went anywhere or did anything money just started melting off you. Roger didn’t mind that, he was completely up for it, but it did mean that if he didn’t get his million-pound bonus this year he was at genuine risk of going broke.”

A ROGUE BY ANY OTHER NAME, Sarah MacLean, February 2012: my love for Sarah is great, and only grows with time. she has really outdone herself, on all fronts, with the new series. four fallen men who run a gaming hall in Victorian (or whatever) London! what women will SAVE THEM? and what women will THEY SAVE? omg. plus and also, a cast-away from Love By the Numbers gets her own happy ending! but i’m not saying any more than that, that would be spoiling things.

WILD THING, Josh Bazell, February 2012: pretty much nothing could ever top BEAT THE REAPER for sheer wooooooooaaaahhh, but he really tries on this one. Peter Brown, ten years later! what does that even look like? and why is there a North American version of the Loch Ness monster involved? proceed from there. while there are no bone-knives or shark-tank-sex scenes in this one (but i mean, come on, you can’t do that again) there is plenty of WTF to go around.

AMONG OTHERS, Jo Walton: holy crap, you guys. if you grew up reading, wishing you could get into your books, convinced that some of it MUST be true, right? i mean, just a little bit of it?, and you’ve always had more opinions about books than anything else, you must read this book. it is ALSO a beautiful and moving story of a girl grieving for her lost twin, and a modern-day fairytale. snifflers, have tissues ready. just out in paperback! recommended to me by the almost-always-correct bookavore.

THE SIXTH GUN VOL 2, Cullen Bunn, Brian Hurtt: less Western, more voodoo! maybe not quiiiiite as satisfying as Vol 1 because there was no Missy (WHERE ARE YOU, Missy?? i know you are out there plotting!) but according to the back cover she is in Vol 3, so there’s that.

SYLVESTER: OR THE WICKED UNCLE, Georgette Heyer: don’t let the subtitle mislead you. contrary to what you might expect, this is not some weird uncle/niece spankfest. (the subtitle is misleading, OKAY?? seriously, guys. worst subtitle for a romance ever.) if Georgette Heyer ever wrote one of those, i don’t know about it. and i kind of wish i did because i would read it just for the sheer WTF value alone. but i digress. this is another Austen-esque gentle romance. the lead is kind of a prig, and the heroine is a little wishy-washy, but Heyer at her mediocre is a billion times better than many authors at their best, and whatever you should read this.

CLOUD ATLAS, David Mitchell: i waited a year before reading my boss’s favorite book of pretty much all time. i managed to escape knowing pretty much anything about the plot at all, other than that she liked it. i give you the same gift — know that this is an AMAZING BOOK, and that is all that i am going to tell you, trust me, it’s better that way.

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY, Michel Houellebecq: i cannot get over that i can spell his name right first time, no checking. I HAVE LEVELED UP, YO. i’d never read the dude before, but as i have been telling customers, i will now probably dive into the backlist. he does that thing that i usually hate, where he inserts himself into the story, but the difference here is that MH is a CHARACTER in the story, not some “i” voice suddenly intruding into what has up to this point been a third-person-close narrative, [insert obligatory Kundera rant here] so it’s ok. also bonus points for a seriously grisly murder! p.s. the cover is awful, don’t let it fool you.

CINDER, Marissa Meyer: oh my god you guys, cyborg Cinderella! YOU MUST READ IT. you must. it’s so much fun. very Hunger Games-ian in both writing style (i mean that in both the good and not-so-good ways you might be thinking) and in plotting — great big awesome concept, lots of page-turners, romance on the side. this book induced uncontrollable text-messaging in both myself and wonderali, which is always a good sign. also?? each book in the series is going to be a different fairytale character, from what i hear, and I SWEAR TO GOD i know who is next and i cannot freaking contain myself.

• Richard Russo, in a NY Times Op Ed. favorite bit: “As I see it, the problem with Amazon stems from the fact that though it started out as a bookseller, it isn’t anymore, not really. It sells everything now, and it sells it all aggressively. Maybe Amazon doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe because it’s simply too big to care.” BONUS: Lacy and hello hello books get name-dropped by RICHARD FREAKING RUSSO!

• Dustin, who always and forever wins at angry-funny. favorite bit: “IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.” seriously you guys, i laughed many times. also, “The whole idea of a culture is that it be shared, if not communal, and the act of bringing people together in ways that make the books, and a shared enjoyment of the books, available, even if it doesn’t necessitate buying the books, could only be mocked by someone with a very sad and tenuous point to make.”
• Stephanie, whose opinion i ask for on a regular basis so i can know what i think about things. favorite bit: “I really want to fix [Amazon], even though this is a company which is so actively trying to put me out of work that I would not be surprised if its next move was to issue bounties for the still-functioning brains of actual human booksellers.” also, “There are so many good books coming out right now we could each double our reading time and still not find room for all of them, and that’s not even taking into consideration the wealth of classics on which we are perched. And instead of talking about them, we are talking about Amazon and whether they are nice. Again.”

somewhere on the internet last week (i searched but couldn’t find it again), there was a piece on the brains behind Occupy Writers, and how overjoyed but also overwhelmed they were by the flood of support and submissions. i sent them an email offering to help, and this weekend i got my first list of names to verify and format. i was delighted to see names of authors i recognize, authors i know in person even, joining the ranks alongside others about whom i am now curious, some international even (although for the record those are really hard to verify, and Google Translate is crap at Turkish).

i was in Baltimore this past weekend and was talking with some friends (some kinda New Agey, 25-35, liberal friends) about the Occupy movement. they were all decidedly on the fence, which surprised me. one of them in particular was irked that some person had gotten a ticket for sleeping on a park bench, and didn’t understand how that was helpful in protesting economic injustice. this same friend had been part of the march on Times Square. i am a political ostrich, and my help to the OWS movement thus far has been in entirely booknerd form, but fundamentally i am on board with the movement and i guess i assume that if i am, most people i know are as well, and that’s just not true, apparently.

Monday night i was on the L train and i saw a couple dressed up as Octopi Wall Street for Halloween, and they were grinning ear to ear and looked like they were having an absolute blast, and i wanted to hug them (but that would have been weird so i didn’t).

The Rumpus posted about the Oakland General Strike this morning, linking to a bunch of cool stuff including these posters (art geek alert).

according to Merriam-Webster, a dystopia is “an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives.”

pretty straightforward, right? i mean, you COULD get really hung up on what counts as “an imaginary place,” technically speaking ALL FICTION is imaginary, and ALL FICTION contains people living dehumanized and fearful lives, but let’s not split hairs. Zevin’s book takes place in a New York some 70-odd years in the future, in which the economic recession just went right along and the city is a crumbling mess. not a huge stretch, sadly. slang is different, social mores (and in particular controlled substances) have changed but otherwise life is pretty recognizable. dystopia? only if you’re stretching.

i think this is one of those “spirit of the law” rather than “letter of the law” issues. what’s the real crux of Zevin’s book? how a girl in a mafioso family will deal with the breakdown of her world, and the lengths to which she’ll in order to protect her family. whereas in, let’s say, UGLIES (which i would consider a true dystopia) the reader is asked to consider a totally foreign political system in which, yes, citizens are deliberately dehumanized and coerced.

why does it matter? dystopia is the new buzzword, a catchy marketingspeak term that will, theoretically, attract the teens! sell more books! and hey, i am all for the selling of books to teens. but a bait-and-switch situation is not particularly helpful. if a reader picks up ALL THESE THINGS and is expecting UGLIES (or vice versa), they may very well be disappointed. both books are excellent and well worth the read, but they’re horses of a different color.

we need a new word. what do you call a book that takes place in a future that’s not great? i’d like to use “futuristic” but i think it’s got too much of a techno-bent to it. it makes me think of flying cars. doesn’t it make you think of flying cars?