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.)

(A note on pronunciation: Mark and I are both Canadian and so pronounce the letter ‘Z’ as ‘zed’, however, that completely ruins the wordplay of the title of Brooks’ book, so we played along and used the American pronunciation.)

We also discussed:

• Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (book)
• Moneyball (movie)
• Nate Silver
• Quants
• Bill James
• Boomerang by Michael Lewis
• Margin Call
• Brad Pitt eating
• Michael Lewis on Moneyball and Boomerang on The Daily Show
• District 9
• Strictly Ballroom
• Errol Morris
• George Romero
• Milla Jovovich
• Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Guide

We also mention:

• Kevin Chong’s Baroque-a-nova (French Cover)
• Kevin Chong’s Neil Young Nation
• Kevin Chong’s Beauty + Pity (trailers)
• Kevin Chong’s My Year of the Racehorse: Falling in Love with the Sport of Kings
• Kevin Chong on Wikipedia, cited as an accomplished show dog handle, and for an appearance in Blood Sport 2
• Steven Galloway
• Zoolander
• David McGimpsey’s CoachHouse page
• David McGimpsey’s Enroute column on sandwiches
• Justin Bieber
• Barnaby Jones
• ee cummings
• A Night Without Armor : Poems by Jewel
• Dennis Johnson’s Train Dreams
• Dennis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke
• Dennis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son
• Martin Scorsese
• Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
• @kevinchong1975

• The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
• Jacob Rubin’s article on Slate.com, The Death of Titles
• The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2011
• Gridzbi Spudvetch/Boom! by Mark Haddon
• The woman who sued over the trailer for the movie ‘Drive’
• Wes Anderson. A lot.
• Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding
• My Kid Could Paint That
• Toronto couple raising a child without gender restrictions
• Christopher Guest
• Jonathan Tropper

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.

We also mention:

• The Adventures of Tintin: Collector’s Gift Set
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling
• The Art Museum
• Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
• A History Of The World In 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
• A History Of The World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
• James Burke’s Connections
• Chew
• Fables, Preacher, Transmetropolitian
• Iron House by John Hart on the indigo book blog

We also mention:

• Richard K. Morgan’s ‘The Steel Remains‘
• Ian Tregillis’ ‘Bitter Seeds’
• Additional info: The new mass market paperback release of ‘Bitter Seeds’ will include the prequel short story ‘What Doctor Gottlieb Saw‘.
• Correction: The audio version of Bitter Seeds’ sequel ‘The Coldest War’ will be released in December 2011, not 2010.
• Ian Tregillis on the Wild Cards series
• Malcolm Gladwell’s ketchup essay
• Perry Moore’s ‘Hero’
• Perry Moore on the treatment of gay characters in comics
• Trailer for ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close‘
• Tom Hanks’ brother Jim
• Brooke Gladstone ‘The Influencing Machine‘ trailer

We also mention:

• Enthusiasticast Episode 59
• The Steel Remains by Richard K Morgan
• Juliet Marillier’s Son of the Shadows
• Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game — Enthusiasticast Episode 69
• Peter Darbyshire On Orson Scott Card at the province (also http://www.peterdarbyshire.com)
• www.thomaslitchford.com
• Enthusiasticast Episode 50 where Jon goes Romance.
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

We also talk about:

• McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses as read by Brad Pitt
• McCarthy’s The Crossing
• McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
• McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men
• McCarthy’s The Road
• James Franco Adapting McCarthy’s ‘Child of God’
• Todd Field directed Beautiful Children
• Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz in the movie of All The Pretty Horses
• Matt Damon in Contagion
• The Lion King
• Ryan Gosling’s Drive
• The Booker Prize
• The Amazing Dan Stiles
• The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson with references to Miranda July
• Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
• Terri — Movie with John C Reilly written Patrick DeWitt
• Scott Westerfeld’s Goliath

We also mention:

• Amazon working on a subscription library for books, says WSJ (http://thisismynext.com)
• Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One as read by Wil Wheaton
• The 33 Best Books Remaining on the Last Day of the Borders in the Time Warner Center at theawl.com
• The Harvard Co-op Bookstore
• Walter Macken
• WakeField Press
• James Sallis’ Drive
• Fanboys the movie

We also mention:

• Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus
• Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be.
• Kate Beaton’s Hark a Vagrant.
• Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt
• Dani Couture’s Algoma
• Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows On The Season
• Douglas Coupland’s and Graham Roumieu’s Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People
• Neal Stephenson’s Reamde
• “The Mongoliad” By Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and Friends from Subutai
• Michael Crichton’s Airframe
• Michael Lewis’ Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
• Michael Lewis’ Big Short
• Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest
• Sebastian Junger’s War
• Michael Lewis’ It’s the Economy, Dummkopf! from Vanity Fair
• Mark Bowden’s Worm: The First Digital World War
• Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84
• Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche
• The Third Reich: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño
• All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books at Time.com
• Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
• Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast
• Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking
• The September Issue — the movie.
• Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis
• Joan Didion’s Blue Nights

We also mention:

• Gosling in Drive
• Girl With a Dragon Tattoo
• Moneyball
• Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol
• Brad Bird and The Iron Giant
• EW.com Fall Movie Preview
• Spiderman, Batman, Avengers and Superman
• Bridesmaids, Hangover II, Terrible Bosses, and The Change Up
• The Adventures Tin Tin
• The second Sherlock Holmes movie
• The Iron Lady
• My Week With Marilyn, Colin Clark, and The Prince and The Showgirl
• Contagion, The Bourne Ultimatum,  The Informant, Saramago’s Blindness and Outbreak
• The Killer Elite remake
• Jason Reitman’s Young Adult
• The Rum Diary, Diablo Cody and Juno
• Jason Reitman on The Slash Filmcast
• In Time, Gattaca, The Truman Show
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
• The Casual Optimist
• The Wire
• The Muppets
• Mark Strong
• Cameron Crowe’s Oeuvre, Elizabethtown, Pearl Jam Twenty, We Bought A Zoo
• Ides of March
• xkcd.com, cancer, Jack Layton, Steve Jobs
• Sloan Crosley @askanyone, How Did You Get this Number, and Frozen Ground
• David Rakoff, David Sedaris, The Cosby Show
• Haddon’s Curious Incident Of Dog in The Night Time
• Ayrton Senna ‘s biopic
• Navy SEAL Jon Tumilson and his dog Hawkeye

We also mention

• Data-driven literary criticism
• Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything by Jonah Lehrer (Wired Science)
• The Mechanic Muse Column in the New York Times
• War Horse entry at Wikipedia
• Toronto scientists determine that fiction can change personalities in Quill and Quire
• Ender’s Game covers over time. 1, 2, 3, 4.
• “The Starship Trooper’s version of Harry Potter.” ~ Jon.
• Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
• Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash
• Orson Scott Card’s Wikipedia entry
• Asimov
• The Hunger Games
• Hat Rack River — Orson Scott Card’s official site

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!

We also mention:

• TheMillions Review of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains
• macfreedom.com
• Last Night in Montreal by Emily St John Mandel
• The Singer’s Gun by Emily St John Mandel
• Unbridled Book’s announcement of Emily St John Mandel’s 3rd novel
• Emily’s tribute to Emilie Jacobson of Curtis Brown
• Patrick Brown’s review of Emily Mandel’s The Singer’s Gun
• Emily Mandel’s author photo
• The Second Life of Irmgard Keun by Emily St John Mandel
• Wikipedia entry for Irmgard Keun
• After Midnight by Irmgard Keun and Anthea Bell at Amazon
• Hans Fallada at Melville House
• The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun and Kathie von Ankum at Amazon
• Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
• emilymandel.com
• Emily Mandel on Twitter
• Emily is reading at Banksquare Books
• Emily is also reading in Brooklyn at the end of August
• Emily St. John Mandel’s 5 Questions Never to Ask at a Bookstore Reading at Blurb is a Verb.

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.)

We also mention:

• Bat Segundo Show and EdRants.com
• Come Meet the Author, but Open Your Wallet NYT
• Douglas Coupland
• The IFOA
• William Gaddis’s The Recognitions
• McNally Jackson
• 1000 Fan Theory
• Neil Gaiman
• Alamo Draft House Movie Poster Series
• Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from The Goon Squad
• Preacher’s Fuck Communism lighter
• David Mitchell’s New York tour
• Edith Bolton reading series
• Thomas Kinkade and James Mason
• Stone Arabia in NY state
• Don Delillo
• Sufjan Stevens and Brian Wilson’s Smile
• Dennis Wilson and Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta

See also Ed’s Roundtable part one, two, three, four, and five.

We also mention:

• The end of Harry Potter movie franchise
• Da Vinci Code
• Infinite Jest
• The Secret
• The Alchemist
• Citizen Kane
• Lord of The Rings
• Game of Thrones
• Ben Macintyre entry Wikipedia
• Ben Macintyre’s The Englishman’s Daughter
• Eddie Chapman’s entry on Wikipedia
• Book Of Lies by Mary Horlock
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• Erik Larson’s Devil in the White in City
• Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat
• The Heist Society books by Ally Carter

We also mention:

• John Locke becoming a million seller on Kindle, 99 cents at a time.
• .xxx TLD entry on Wikipedia
• His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
• Studios pull back from San Diego Comic Con (ew.com)
• Beastly book and movie
• Meghan Cox Gurdon’s Darkness Too Visible from WSJ.com
• Sliding Doors
• Falling Down
• Gossip Girl series

Music: Thanks to Drift for licensing ‘Invisible’ under creative commons.

We also mention:

• Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire
• Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story
• Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus TEDTalk
• Jon had a TI-99 4a, not an Amiga
• FreedomTM by Daniel Suarez
• DCU Online
• Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King and movie
• The Green Mile by Stephen King
• OZ The TV Series
• To Kill A Mockingbird
• Angola Louisiana State Penitentiary
• The Angolite prison newspaper
• Wilbert Rideau on Wikipedia
• George Polk Award
• C. Paul Phelps — the warden who brings press freedom to Angola
• Burl Cain — the warden Rideau says ended press freedom in Angola
• Zeitoun
• Hellhole by Atul Gawande - The New Yorker
• The Way to Stop Prison Rape by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow

Music: Thanks to Drift for licensing ‘Invisible’ under creative commons.

We also mention…

• The 2011 MobyAwards
• Trailer for Tree of Codes
• Trailer for Wild Child
• Trailer for Where Good Ideas Come From
• Trailer for Little Chickens, Big Day
• Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s rugged Jack Reacher
• Liam Neeson, Daniel Craig, Josh Brolin, Armie Hammer are our picks to play Jack Reacher
• Fuzzy Typewriter podcast from Paul Montgomery
• Restarting Comics’ Clock Is Issue No. 1 By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES from NYT.
• Josh Ferris’ And Then We Came To The End
• Slate editor David Plotz’s chose The Unnamed for book of the year in 2010.
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Road
• The Unnamed on Goodreads
• twitter.com/enthusiasticast

Music: Thanks to Drift for licensing ‘Invisible’ under creative commons.