January Books

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

Fiction

The Intimates - Ralph Sassone; "Apparently, people didn't look at pictures anymore and ask if they were lifelike. They looked at their lives and compared them to images they'd seen somewhere."

The Lost Books of the Odyssey - Zachary Mason; "Chapters are told from the point of view of Odysseus, Achilles, even Polyphemus the Cyclops; throughout, Mason envisions alternate fates for these characters."

The Lost Gate - Orson Scott Card; "There is a hidden library with only a few dozen books that are written in a secret language which Dan and his cousins are expected to learn. But they are never to speak a word of it with anyone else, or even where anyone else might hear. There are other secrets too, even secrets kept from Dan. And that will lead to disaster."

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! - Douglas Coupland; "Takes a pop-culture approach to the man known for the phrase 'the medium is the message,' a deep thinker who ended up popularized almost in spite of himself."

The Radleys - Matt Haig; "The parents know what they are, and have concealed this knowlege from their teenage kids, who, inadvertently abstaining from the blood they don't know they need to drink, suffer from nausea, insomnia, weakness, 'photodermatosis,' and mortifying high school unpopularity. Then one night, attacked by a large ogre of a boy, the daughter discovers her true nature the hard way, precipitating a vampire family crisis."

Nonfiction

Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed - Larry Rohter; "A Times reporter's affectionate account."

The Function of Criticism Today - Alfred Kazin; "Any critic who is any good is going to write out of a profound inner struggle between what has been and what must be, the values he is used to and those which presently exist, between the past and the present out of which the future must be born. This struggle with oneself as well as with the age, out of which something must be written and which therefore can be read - this is my test for a critic."

A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation - Daniel Menaker; A former executive at Random House, Menaker draws on an array of sources - the dating scene, Socrates, studies on the hormone oxytocin, Barack Obama - in this exploration of how conversation has evolved and how it works."

How I Killed Pluto: And Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown; "The astronomer behind the discovery that led to Pluto's demotion from planethood discusses his work and his family life."

Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World - Bernard Henri Levy and Michel Houellebecq; "Scorned by the French public and media, the two provocateurs decided to examine all that hatred with this epistolary collection in which they assault each other, the public, and, most often, themselves with an arsenal of bitterly sarcastic bons mots."