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This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, edited by John Brockman, 2010, HarperPerennial, 390 pages.
It’s all about the robots.
And our evolving computerized robotic brains and the evolving brain-merged robotic Internet — and possibly some aliens.
Shades of Grey: A Novel, by Jasper Fforde, Viking, 2009, 390 pages.
Sharp, cerebral, highly imaginative and rich with ideas, Shades of Grey brings back the joy of reading from underneath the rubble of bestselling same old same old.
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier (2010, Knopf, 209 pages)
Virtual reality engineer and all-around thinker Jaron Lanier argues, with feeling, against cybernetic totalism in the disjointed but still interesting You Are Not a Gadget.
Who’s the poser now?
JD Salinger: Jan. 1, 1919 – Jan. 27, 2010
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where and when I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time, and how much the book meant to me as a kid, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Losing Season, by Jack Ridl, CavanKerry Press, 2009, 89 pages
Given that Jack Ridl’s father was Hall of Fame college b-ball coach Charles “Buzz” Ridl, it’s no surprise that Losing Season is such a lucid look into the ways amateur sports affect people’s everyday lives. What is surprising is how unsettling the whole thing is in Ridl’s world.
Beauty of the Badlands, by Cliff Fell, Victoria University Press, 107 pages
Cliff Fell’s new book is a few things: a road trip, a tribute to Bob Dylan and a post-9/11 warning that things have changed.
Trotsky: A Graphic Biography by Rick Geary (Hill & Wang, 2009, 112 pages)
What irascible writer wouldn’t love to be a modern Trotsky, co-fomenter of the Russian Revolution with his unwanted sidekick Lenin?
A Good Fall: Stories, by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books, 240 pages, $24.95, 2009)
You know you’re reading a damn fine collection of short fiction when you finish a story about a young man living with three Asian prostitutes (“The House Behind the Weeping Cherry”), and there’s no one around to share your awe and excitement with, except your six-year-old daughter, so you give her a quick synopsis anyway. And then she tells you that she prefers Junie B. Jones. “Someday,” you say to her.
The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, by Padgett Powell (Ecco Books, 2009, 164 pages)
I’m sure someone will tell me I just didn’t get it, but I am angry that I wasted my time reading all 164 pages of this book that’s composed entirely of questions.
After the Honeymoon, by Nathan Graziano, Sunnyoutside Press, 2009, 94 pages
Manchester’s own Nathan Graziano sure knows how to write first lines. Here are a couple from his latest collection, After the Honeymoon:
Hound, by Vincent McCaffrey, Small Beer Press, 2009, 271 pages.
By Nate Graziano letters@hippopress.com
I love the small presses. When I pick up a book and glance at the spine and see it’s not Penguin or HarperCollins or Scribner, I’m automatically rooting for it to do well. It’s like rooting against the Yankees: you want to see the little guy succeed. So when I picked up former Boston bookshop owner Vincent McCaffrey’s first mystery novel, Hound, and glanced at the binding and saw Small Beer Press, hell, what’s not to love going into it?
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