September Books

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

Fiction

The Dervish House - Ian McDonald; "Having written novels set in a future Brazil and a future India, McDonald now tackles Istanbul circa 2027 in this ambitious, harrowing, sometimes frustrating science fiction thriller."

Elephant and Piggie series - Mo Willems; "Better than Beckett . . . Elephant and Piggie are the Vladimir and Estragon of Children's Literature."

How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe - Charles Yu "must tread carefully: too much of the world-building, the whimsical invention, the armchair mathematics, the flights of philosophy, these lateral motions of the novel, threaten to destabilize it and leave it incapable of imparting a satisfying narrational truth. Too little of these intricate electron clouds surrounding the nucleus of the book and we wander into the boring hold of sentimentality and banality."

The Maze Runner - James Dashner; "A stone wall imprisons teenagers who live by their wits and remember nothing of their earlier lives."

Zero History - William Gibson; "Several characters from Spook Country return to a viral marketing and coolhunting agency; from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer."

Nonfiction

It's a Book - Lane Smith; Children's picture book that "doesn't tweet or need recharging."

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - Michael J. Sandel; "A Harvard professor seeks to bring implicit arguments about justice into the open."

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - David Sedaris; "Some Sedaris fans felt he had begun to exhaust his store of Homo sapiens-based anecdotes in 2008's When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Squirrel does seem to free him creatively, while still indulging his singularly skewed worldview."

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages - Guy Deutscher "who stresses the role of culture in language, treads some amusingly idiosyncratic linguistic bypaths."

A Week at the Airport - Alain de Botton; "One of our most influential essayists and thinkers indulges his somewhat freakish love of airports by spending a week at London's Heathrow."