November 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

The Cry of the Sloth: The Mostly Tragic Story of Andrew Whittaker, Being His Collected, Final, and Absolutely Complete Writings - Sam Savage; "offbeat second novel is an epistolary collage: letters, grocery lists, classified ads, press releases, submission guidelines for a literary magazine, rough drafts of novel passages, journal entries, posted warnings from slumlords - all written by the protagonist, Andrew Whittaker, a lethargic failure in nearly everything he turns his hand to."

Dinotrux - Chris Gall; "Millions of years ago, prehistoric trucks roamed the earth. They were huge. They were hungry. But they weren't helpful like they are today. They rumbled, roared and chomped."

The English Major - Jim Harrison; "Is to midlife crisis what The Catcher in the Rye is to adolescence."

Tales from Outer Suburbia - Shaun Tan; "the characters are vivid and original, the plots blend logic and whimsy, and the endings always pay off, if never quite the way you expect."

The Wordy Shipmates - Sarah Vowell; "Juxtaposes serious and stirring excerpts from sermons and poetry with Puritan-themed kitsch to make a point about our understanding of the American past."

Nonfiction

Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America - Barbara Ehrenreich; "What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive."

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home - Rhoda Janzen; "The narrative voice of the person who grew up in an ethnic religious community, escaped it, then looked back with clearsighted objectivity and appreciation."

Superfreakonomics - Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner; "A scholar and a journalist apply economic thinking to everything: the sequel."

What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell; "A decade of New Yorker essays."

Years of Dust: The Story of the Dust Bowl - Albert Marrin; "Knits together natural science and sociology, news stories, snippets from novels and poems, eyewitness descriptions, journal entries, and the words of hardtime bards like John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie."