We mention:

• Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow; his Wikipedia page; his TED talk.
• Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
• Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper
• Franzenfreude
• Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
• Zadie Smith
• Jilly Cooper (Jodhpurs! Or are they breeches? Equestrians, debate amongst yourselves. Either way, homes is getting fresh.)
• Fifty Shades of Grey
• Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander
• Ursula K. Le Guin
• Richard Wiseman
• Malcolm Gladwell
• David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart
• Dan Ariely’s The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty
• Nobody actually reads A Brief History of Time
• Richard Thaler’s Nudge
• Anchor pricing
• Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness
• Denmark is the happiest place on Earth
• Nassim Taleb

There was a (gasp!) delay between recording and posting this episode, so a lot of the books that we talk about as ‘coming soon’ are now, in fact, ‘out recently’ and in some cases ‘out quite a while ago’. We’re still excited about them, though.

We talk about:

• Janet Evanovich
• Kristen Cashore‘s Bitterblue
• Dan Chaon’s short story collection Stay Awake. The episode where Mark is enthusiastic about his novel Await Your Reply is here, and Jon weighs in here.
• Mark Haddon’s The Red House. His prize-winning art.
• Mark Leyner’s The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack
• Veronica Roth‘s Insurgent. Jon is enthusiastic about Divergent here.
• Greg Rucka’s Alpha. Rucka talks about writing female characters here.
• John Scalzi’s Redshirts
• Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptation of Richard Stark’s (Donald Westlake’s) The Score.
• Jonathan Tropper’s One Last Thing Before I Go. Jon is enthusiastic about This Is Where I Leave You here.
• Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities. Jon is enthusiastic about Ship Breaker here.
• The over-the-top press release for Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her. Jon is enthusiastic about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in the prehistoric days of the podcast here.
• Mark Helprin’s In Sunlight and in Shadow.
• Neal Stephenson and co.’s The Mongoliad.
• Daniel Suarez’ Kill Decision. Mark is enthusiastic about Daemon (another one from the early days) here. Jon jumps on the bandwagon here.
• Mark discovers Lee Child’s Reacher books.
• One for the Money (film) on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
• Christa Faust’s Money Shot.
• The House to Astonish podcast. (The ‘two Scottish guys’ are Paul O’Brien and Al Kennedy, and they’re genius. We don’t know why Jon kept referring to them like that, as if they were the podcasting equivalent of Macbeth.)

We mention:

• The National Book Awards
• The Giller Prize
• Laura Miller at Salon, on book awards
• Who the Hell is Arcade Fire?
• It was the New York Times: when book awards tried to go mainstream.
• More Laura Miller: can we even agree what makes great literature?
• Amazon’s Best Books of 2011. (In other news: 2011 – still not over at the time of this posting.)
• Keith Gessen’s Vanity Fair article on Chad Harbach
• I meant Shoeless Joe. I called it The Field of Dreams because who’s not more familiar with the movie version. I added the “The” because that’s what all the cool kids are doing. The Rock. The God Damn Batman. Everybody.
• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. (For the briefest of moments I thought the personal appeal from Wikipedia programmer Brandon Harris was Thomas Mann’s author photo. Dissonant!)
• David Lodge
• A Separate Peace
• Paul Quarrington
• Our discussion of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
• Evelyn Waugh
• Jason Kottke loves Gordon Korman’s Bruno and Boots. So should you.

The Cat’s Table
Michael Ondaatje
I first read Ondaatje in 1992—The Collected Works of Billy the Kid—while in the grip of an untreated fever from streptococcal pharyngitis. (Being Canadian and having access to free healthcare still requires the individual good sense to go see a doctor. Ah, 19 year-old me… such a fuckwit.) I mean it only as a compliment when I say that he was the perfect writer to read while shivering and hallucinating in a tiny garrett in a bad part of town, though I am certain that reading his new novel on a commuter train while sipping hot coffee will be equally evocative and illuminating.
(Review.)

The Leftovers
Tom Perrotta
All I know about Tom Perrotta is that he writes novels that get turned into good movies (Election, Little Children). This time out he is tackling the timely topic of a post-Rapture world, telling the story through the lens of those left behind in one small town. It’s being adapted for HBO, but I’m thinking that it’s best not to wait. I mean, I’ve only got until October.
(Review.)

Scorch City
Toby Ball
Something weird is going on: if I read an author and am looking forward to their next book, they take forever (Markus Zusak, Mark Haddon, Max Brooks) but if I’ve dawdled and taken my time getting around to someone, they stack them up like cordwood so that I’m only more daunted to start. Such is the case with Toby Ball, whose well-received debut novel The Vaults is still glaring out at me from the to-read pile, and who now has a follow-up on the shelves. Apparently it’s good, too.
Fine, Ball, I’ll read your bloody books. Let’s see how quick you are then.
(Review.)

Machine Man
Max Barry
I read the first draft of this book (you can, too!) and seriously enjoyed it. It would take a fucking-up of significant proportions to turn it into a bad book, and nothing I have read by Max Barry makes me think that’s what happened. This will be my first time with a director’s cut of a novel and I can’t wait.
(Book trailer.)

Ready Player One
Ernest Cline
The book trailer for this one also serves as a litmus test. If you get a wave of nostalgia while watching it, then this is probably for you.

Luminarium
by Alex Shakar
I know pretty much Jack about this book, but… but… I did read this superb article by Shakar about the fate of his first novel, The Savage Girl, and on the basis of that I will now read whatever he chooses to put between two covers. Or, you know, into an ePub file, or… gah! I hate shopping for new metaphors!

Back in Episode 51 Mark was enthusiastic about Ian Tregillis’ Bitter Seeds. If you took him up on that, then you definitely want to check out this short story over at his publisher’s website. And if you didn’t then you still should. “What Doctor Gottlieb Saw” works perfectly as a standalone historical sf short, and it also serves as a nifty prequel to the events of Bitter Seeds. (Sadly, there is still no firm release date on Bitter Seeds’ follow-up The Coldest War. Apparently it’s written, though. It has a cover and everything.)

And I’ve gone on about Max Brooks’ World War Z a bunch of times. So here’s a nifty short story from Brooks about what the vampires thought when the stupid fucking zombies ate all the livestock. (Oh, and they’ve announced a release date for the WWZ film starring some middle-aged bloke named Brad Pitt: December 21, 2012. Mr. Pitt has apparently been travelling back and forth to the “set” using vehicles called “cars”, which he occasionally gets into or out of. It is a fascinating ritual and must be extensively documented. For science.)

Bed
David Whitehouse
Who hasn’t wanted to just stay in bed? Mal Ede goes to bed one day and stays there for twenty years, eventually becoming the world’s fattest man and a media sensation. Billed as a parable about modern life, media culture and family bonds, this British first novel has the kind of advance praise that’s so over-the-top it makes me leery, but a comparison to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a striking cover design and a wonderfully engaging premise mean that I am inclined to check it out despite the fact that it is apparently wonderful.

Bet Me
Jennifer Crusie
I wasn’t kidding about liking Jennifer Crusie. This is the first manuscript she ever completed, although not her first published. A re-written version eventually saw the light of day in 2004, and this is a paperback reprinting of that edition with–in my opinion–a much better cover.

Zero History
William Gibson
Mark and I quibbled about this on the show, but it grew on Mark enough to make it onto his best of the year list, and here it is in paperback. Despite the danger of a windowed release schedule for a book that was only written five minutes into the future to begin with–can such a thing survive intact a whole year past its initial publication date?–I think ZH squares the circle by making itself in part an analysis of that exact problem. If I hadn’t already read it, I still would.

Collecting Cooper
Paul Cleave
I read Paul Cleave’s Blood Men last year and it was a perfectly good thriller, but I have a rather low threshold for bad things happening to children, which it exceeded, and that’s why you didn’t hear about it on the show. Nonetheless, the writing was strong—he certainly knows how to execute the ‘sympathetic character + clear objective x the toughest obstacles imaginable’ formula—so I am well up for giving Cleave another spin.
(Review. Book trailer.)

Sam and Twitch: The Complete Collection
Brian Michael Bendis (writer) & various artists
Ten years ago when I was voraciously devouring every Bendis book I could get my hands on, the price point on the first collection of his run on Sam and Twitch stopped me in my tracks. $34.95 for a black and white paperback? Forget that! And then five years later a new edition was released, this time with a second volume collecting the rest of the Bendis S&T stories: still paperback, still black and white, $31.99 apiece. Sigh.
Now, another five years later, they’ve finally got it right. The entire run in one hardcover, plus backmatter, for $37.50.
By all accounts these are top-notch crime comics, and I’m really looking forward to finally reading them.
(Review of an earlier edition.)

Touchy Subjects
Emma Donoghue
When a writer is as good as Donoghue, is getting her back catalogue reprinted on the heels of a massive success considered a cash grab or a public service?
Oh, who cares? If you’ve read Room then you know this book’s title is probably the least-kidding title on a long list of titles that are not fucking kidding.
(Review.)

In other follow-up news:

• The prologue and first chapter of Lawrence Block’s soon-to-be-released A Drop of the Hard Stuff can be found here.
• The trailer for my soon-to-be-favourite mixed martial arts movie Warrior can be found here.

But every now and again you find the solicit for Wild Thing, the follow-up to Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell’s compulsively readable and hilariously-footnoted debut novel about a former hitman-turned-surgeon-in-the-witness-protection program.

From the product description:

It’s hard to find work as a doctor when using your real name will get you killed. So hard that when a reclusive billionaire offers Dr. Peter Brown, aka Pietro Brnwa, a job accompanying a sexy but self-destructive paleontologist on the world’s worst field assignment, Brown has no real choice but to say yes. Even if it means that an army of murderers, mobsters, and international drug dealers-not to mention the occasional lake monster-are about to have a serious Pietro Brnwa problem.

For more reasons why Bazell–who makes his daily bread and butter as a proper medical doctor–is awesome, check out his terrifying answers to oddball medical questions in a feature on Chuck Palahniuk’s website called ‘Sorry You Asked’.

Well, thank you universe: a week later I read about Warrior, a fall 2011 movie release featuring Tom Hardy (star of awesome things that are awesome) and Joel Edgerton as brothers who end up on the wrong side of a family dispute and an MMA title fight.

In future episodes of the show you may expect discussions of numerology and how I would be excited to win the lottery.

Between this and the fact that they are costuming right out of the book (see Hathaway’s dress in the pic below), I feel like there is both thoughtfulness and faithfulness behind this adaptation.

One Day releases July 8, with Larry Crowne the week before and Friends With Benefits two weeks after. That’s a good month for fans of romance.

As always, your mileage may vary. I’d love to hear what other people think. If you’ve read the book, which one looks like the book you read, and if you haven’t which one makes you want to give it a go?

Added bonus: Here is a playlist compiled by Egan herself to accompany the novel.

Over at his blog China Mieville is serialising a webcomic under the tag ‘London Intrusion’. I’m about halfway through The City & the city right now, and I sense the same everything you know is everything you know but that’s not all there is to know-vibe from these panels.

(Apparently getting constant hits of stimulus from our mobile devices is causing us all to become addicted to the dopamine in our own brains. I don’t know why people say that’s a bad thing. It’s just a thing, and I salute any and all attempts to create art for my newly-dimished attention span. Cheers, Mr. M.)

(via.)

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
Mike Brown
There was a reason he had to sleep naked in the yard while Goofy got to be inside wearing clothes and shit.
(Excerpt. Mark wants this for Christmas.)

Apocalypse for Beginners
Nicolas Dickner
So you’re sticking with “Dickner”, huh?
Bold.
That was a really cheap shot. Also, the translator’s name is Lazer Lederhendler. There is a sublimity of naming mojo going on here that I don’t think I’m ready to fully grasp.
(Excerpt. Review.)

The Sword Complete Collected Deluxe Hardcover
Joshua and Jonathan Luna
I know, what the fuck is going on with that sword, right? But look.
(Excerpt. I liked volume 1 in public. It ended like a boss.)

*This is going to be the last one of these until after Christmas because the flow of books becomes (a) small, and (b) almost exclusively restricted to self-help and diet books. If I miss anything I’ll catch up with it afterwards, never fear. And since chances are—whatever faith or lack thereof you subscribe to—you’re celebrating some kind of mid-winter holiday that involves eating and goodwill, let me take this opportunity to wish you all the best. Thanks for reading!

It also obliquely features what would have been a better answer to Mark’s question in the podcast about current memes in superhero comics, namely: the incredible powerful figure who presents himself as wholly benign (i.e. Superman) but is actually, terrifyingly not. (Warning: loads of graphic violence in these links.) Marvel did their version with the Sentry, Robert Kirkman did it with Omni-Man in Invincible, Mark Waid is doing it with the Plutonian in Irredeemable, Tomasi and Champagne did it in The Mighty, and Garth Ennis is doing the ultra-explicit version with the Homelander in The Boys.

Of course, DC can’t go full-antihero with Superman, whose other pole is as a stand-in for Christ, so they nod towards it in the visage of ‘angry, red-eyed Superman’. I don’t want to get political, but I think it is very reflective, if unconsciously so, of our feelings about the greater powers at work in the world. We’re worried about the “heroes” now, as well as the villains.

 Check it out:

The Bed of Procrustes
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Do you remember how Michael Pollan helped you feel like a douchebag for grocery shopping, and then, while your self-esteem was low, his publisher got you to buy a tiny little book for too much money? (Food Rules. So do profit margins, apparently.) Well, replace “Michael Pollan” with “Nassim Nicholas Taleb” and “grocery shopping” with “being alive”.
You know, I think I’m going to be okay, and then he reference a  Greek myth about dismemberment and… >swoon<.

Matched
Ally Condie
I enjoyed Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies books, so I suppose I should man up and accept that I’m probably going to enjoy this, too.
Though “man up” may not be the most appropriate descriptor. (Book trailer. Interview. Review.)

Yesterday’s Tomorrows
Rian Hughes
As a boy in England I loved me some Dan Dare, so you can just imagine that Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes’ impossible-to-find re-imagining of the fabulously-eyebrowed space hero–reprinted here–messed me up but good. Close your eyes and think of England, indeed. (Article.)

Twice now authors have turned up in the comments after we mentioned their book. I say this so that (a) you will be impressed with my restraint next week when I pass on mentioning Monica Bellucci’s new photo book, and (b) to say that while I sincerely want to read both of these books, I have also briefly considered the notion that Martin and Pegg will both show up, become pals, do legendary work together, and that I will be listed in a hotly-contested Wikipedia article as ‘cyber-midwife to comedy greatness’.

I mean, come on, ‘Martin and Pegg’? That’s an ampersand away from legendary already.

An Object of Beauty
Steve Martin
Martin’s excellent autobiography Born Standing Up could have been a case study for the ’10,000 hour rule’–the theory,  popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, that it requires 10,000 hours of hard work to attain world-class proficiency in any field. He’s had a similarly long run-up to novel writing as he did to stand-up comedy, having published two novellas, a children’s book, a collection of essays, and the aforementioned autobiography over the last 11 years.
The reviews I’ve read would indicate that it was not at all wasted effort.

Nerd Do Well
Simon Pegg
Some bios you read for historical value, and some you read for prurience, and some you read because they contain a fictional parallel narrative entitled The Adventures of Simon Pegg and Canterbury and the Mystery of the Scarlet Panther and the Star of Nefertiti and the Tablet of Amonhotep IV.
That’s why I read Unbearable Lightness, and it’s why I’m reading this.
(Review. Video.)

Gentlemen, the comments are yours.

Luka and the Fire of Life
by Salman Rushdie
Another novella for young readers from Rushdie, this companion piece to Haroun and the Sea of Stories is about Haroun’s younger brother Luka. Not to be confused with that chick on the second floor.
(Review.)

Decoded
Jay-Z
He’s got 99 problems but a book ain’t one.
Oh God, that was terribe. I’m so sorry.
(Review.)

Matterhorn
Karl Merlantes
Mark was all about this book in hardcover. That edition was 592 pages long and this new paperback is 680 pages long, which means it got 88 pages more awesome since March.
Or they reformatted so people could still read the words printed close to the spine.
One of those.

Full Dark, No Stars
Stephen King
Let us take moment to appreciate the incredible balls it takes to put the words “no stars” in the title of your book. Okay, now let’s remember that Stephen King has two previous collections of four novellas (which is what this is) and both of them contain some of his absolute finest work (The Long Walk, The Running Man, The Body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption).

Everything You Know is Pong
edited by Eli Horowitz and Roger Bennett
If a tribute to table tennis with a pun-based title and a contribution from Nick Hornby is pong, then I don’t want to be right.

Young Junius
Seth Harwood
This story of a remorseless teen’s bloody, revenge-fuelled rampage through a housing project is available as a free audiobook from iTunes–just search for “Young Junius” or “Seth Harwood”–and my natural inclination towards sarcasm is completely disarmed by free shit.
Well-played Harwood, you  magnificent bastard.

The Department of Mad Scientists
Michael Belfiore
If they were proper mad scientists their organization would have a cooler acronym than DARPA.
(C-SPAN2!)

The Master Switch
Tim Wu
Tim Wu is either:
(a) an expert in net neutrality and vastly cleverer than us
(b) the reason that the Woo Girls “woo!”
(Interview!)

Read This Next
Sandra Newman & Howard Mittelmark
Yeah, like people want ideas for what to read next. That’s idiotic.
(Book trailer!)

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (5th Edition)
David Thomson
Organized by personality and not afraid to be subjective, this exhaustive survey of international film is the kind of thing we could get lost in for… well, it’s 1088 pages and we read slow. A long time.

The Mind’s Eye
Oliver Sacks
Have you ever wondered if when you look at a thing and someone else looks at the same thing, are you actually seeing the same thing or are you just agreeing on the word for that thing? We have, and this book is totally about that.

Autumn
David Moody
Do you remember when Jon was enthusiastic about Hater? Well, this is the first of a series of four self-published novels Moody wrote before that book. Sadly, by the time Jon got to the party they were out of print. Happily, that all ends tomorrow.

The Last Run: A Queen & Country Novel
Greg Rucka
For a comics-loving, spy-loving anglophile like Jon, nothing is better than Rucka’s stories of British esionage agents. The stories have flipped back and forth between graphic novels and prose novels, and this one (prose) looks like the end of the road (?) for Tara Chase, Rucka’s greatest fictional creation. If you’re looking for the ground floor you’ll want to be getting Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition, Volume 1. It’s a lot for a little.

Two Generals
Scott Chantler
Jon actually got an advance copy of this one, so a slight break from format. This is a graphic biography of Chantler’s grandfather’s experiences in WWII. If you are any of these: (a) related to a veteran, (b) Canadian, (c) a war history buff, (d) someone who appreciates masterful comics storytelling, or (e) someone who likes stunning book design, you are going to adore this book. Between this and Alan’s War there is some kind of weird war comics memoir renaissance going on.

Today’s installment is brought to you by the word “not”, and italics.

Worth Dying For
Lee Child
Advance reviews have indicated that cranking out two Reacher novels in a single year was perhaps not the best idea, but come one, like we’re not reading this.

Palo Alto
James Franco
Man, I do not know what to make of James Franco, but the excerpt in Entertainment Weekly did the intended. I’m in for this collection of peer-reviewed short fiction. (Commentary. Other excerpt. Other short story.)

Our Kind of Traitor
John le Carré
If you read le Carré then this recommendation is moot. If you don’t, well… you should. May we humbly suggest The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Smiley’s People as a nice place to start.

The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide
Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor
I can’t even begin to unpack the signifier/signified relationship in a text tattoo, but this book of tatoos from and inspired by literature, and the stories behind them, sounds like the perfect high-bar for a literary tour: books so beloved they were injected into the readers’ flesh. Book trailer.

via @seancranbury. Awesome dude. Thanks.