Before you disregard this beautiful sparkly silver book as teen pop-dom fluff, open it and sample Whiting Award winner Teddy Wayne's prose.  What I like best about this novel is Jonny's voice.  While the obvious cultural inspiration for the character is Justin Beiber,  likeable 11 year old pop prodigy Jonny doesn't immediately call to my mind any other literary protagonists. He is smart and funny, but never wise beyond his years or precious. I agree with Publisher's Weekly, which said, "Masterfully executed...the real accomplishment is the unforgettable voice of Jonny.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale is an atmospheric modern day fairy tale set in a small English village near the woods.  The novel begins with the mysterious reappearance of a woman who disappeared twenty years before. The initial explanation she gives is vague, and the one she later gives infuriates her brother with its unbelievability.  Is she lying to hide a shameful or incriminating secret? Did something traumatic happen to her that made her subconscious mind translate the memory into something more tolerable? Is she crazy? Could it be real?

State of Wonder is the kind of book you want to take around with you to keep you company when you're stuck waiting places.  Immediately engaging, there is a lot to enjoy about this book.

Sioban Fallon's short stories of contemporary army life at Fort Hood, Texas, show a side of the Iraq war that we don't often think about: life for those who live on base in the US.    Fallon's characters have wars of their own with their neighbors, within their families, and most often with loneliness and uneasy waiting.  These stories  reverberate with emotion, and shine with a bright inner truth.  I read a story each morning, and found that traces of it quietly shone  all day.

This is the latest in psychology memoirs:  Prosopagnosia - a rare neurological condition that impairs face recognition.  Not being able to recognize people you know is difficult to imagine without reading this book.  What I found even more interesting was Heather Sellers' Florida upbringing by her troubled mother, who nailed windows shut and had an elaborate code for using the telephone.   You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know is most impressive for showing Sellers'  brilliant array of coping mechanisms.

Herzog does for the human/animal relationship what Levitt and Dubner did for Economics, and Gladwell did for everything else.  Interesting reading!

What Watchmen did for postmodern superhero, Logicomix does for the the Bertrand Russel's foundational quest for truth in Mathematics.  In Logicomix, Bertrand Russel narrates his own story, from childhood with his strange, mysterious grandparents, to his student years , to his teaching years and lecturing years.  This graphic novel explained logic to me in a way that I understood (mostly) for the first time, by combining it with history, a little bit of humor, a little bit of romance, madness, war, and theater.  This book would be great for students of math, logic,

The Center Cannot Hold is one of the best memoirs in contemporary insanity lit. Ellyn Saks is a professor of both law and psychiatry and is a strong advocate for the legal rights of the mentally ill. If you liked Touched With Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison, or Girl, Interrupted by Susannah Kayson, this engrossing book shows schizophrenia from an insider’s point of view.

This is the funniest book I’ve ever read about groceries. Pocker is obsessive, outrageous, obnoxious, and he really knows his way around shopping.

This gothic, gorgeously written novel tells the story of a wealthy widower and the wife who found him in a newspaper ad. The story takes place in desolate wisconsin, 1907. I love this book!