An interesting pan-global look at civilization, the lies we tell ourselves, and the tangled web we weave thereby. And is it possible to reset morality?

Selected essays about the 60s, about the heroes and anti-heroes, about California, and about Joan Didion. An essential slice of journalism history.

This collection of two short novellas (en Espanol) was kind of interesting. It had a certain chicklit flavour, and is certainly woman-centred fiction, but isn’t at all fluffy. The stories follow an unwillingly pregnant toreador on a true caper, and an unloved female motocross driver. Each novel is told through a series of viewpoints, which mostly works, especially in the motocross story, which, ironically, I didn’t like as much as the other.

This is an atmospheric book with interesting character portraits, but an ultimately unsatisfying plot. Too many characters are introduced (at length!) for no purpose. It’s supposed to be thought provoking, but left little impression on me.

This is a masterful novel, or at least 2/3 of a novel. It takes a bit long to get to the climax, but the build is so skillfully done that I didn’t mind at all. I admired the way Barnes brings you to the central truths about the characters, but a little disappointed on how he gets to his ending, leaving a few interesting ends completely unaddressed, let alone tied up!

Nigel Slater is no Ruth Reichl when it comes to chronicling a life eaten… Ah well.

This is the weirdest book I have read in a long time. It uses the C word so much it’s no longer shocking by page 20, and it has nothing to do with cooking.

I really like Lamott’s columns in Salon magazine, but mostly I was irritated by this book, which featured a dirt-poor single mother who sends her two year old to daycare even though she’s home all day alone, and who hires musicians for her housewarming party. She was also just sort of selfish and neurotic… and I usually like neurotic characters, but I just wanted this one to dry up a little. Ah well.

A photorealistic graphic novel that deals with issues of homelessness and the modern city, and how each of us deals with our own relationship to a growing problem. Thought provoking, and a quick read.

The first two books in Scott Westerfeld’s distopian look at a future where people are all surgically enhanced to reach the ‘biological’ ideal of beauty, in order to reduce the tensions that come with a society where not everyone reaches these ideals. They’re young adult novels and have a really interesting approach to a lot of the issues of image and fitting in and, well, ecology and society and a bit of everything really. I liked the first a great deal more than the second, mostly because the process of becoming pretty makes for slightly irritating characters – and I’m looking forward to getting the third, Specials, from the library this week.