January Books

These are some titles from last month's New York Times Book Review section that I might like to read at some point:

Fiction

Generation A - Douglas Coupland; "Not a sequel to but rather a thematic wink at Coupland's first novel, Generation X (1991), about young slackers experiencing postindustial fin de siecle ennui and sitting around telling stories."

The Girl With Glass Feet - Ali Shaw; "In a typical fairy tale, the characters are flat and the description minimal. A princess is a princess; a witch, a witch. Here, characters are complicated, informed by tragic personal circumstances."

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death - Charlie Huston; "A California slacker goes to work as a trauma cleaner, dealing with the blood and gore after someone commits suicide or dies alone in festering filth. Along the way there is a complicated romance and some kind of dead-bod-cleanup range war with a rival company."

Nightlight - The Harvard Lampoon; "Belle Goose falls for Edwart Mullen in this parody of the Stephanie Meyer novel Twilight."

A Reliable Wife - Robert Goodrick; "Complications ensue when a wealthy Wisconsin widower in 1907 advertises for a wife."

Nonfiction

Aspects of the Novel - E.M. Forster; "Here we first learned of 'flat' (quickly sketched in) versus 'round' (fully developed) characters and how every book needs some of both."

Digital Revolutionaries: The Men and Women Who Brought Computing To Life - Steve Lohr; "A guided tour of the history of computers and a celebration of the human ingenuity that ushered in the computer age."

The Marketplace of Ideas - Louis Menard; "Why is it so hard to institute a general education curriculum? Why did the humanities discipline undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has 'interdisciplinarity' become a magic word? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?"

Not for Tourists series - Rob Tallia and Jane Pirone; "We've lived in New York for 19 years and we still haven't visited the Statue of Liberty."

Strange Things Happen: A Life with the Police, Polo, and Pygmies - Stewart Copeland; "He was raised in the Middle East, the son of a C.I.A. operative. He was something of a pioneer in the pop exploration of 'world' music, recording with African musicians well before Paul Simon made his Graceland trek."