Douglas Coupland. Video game company. This latest novel is being described as something of an update to Microserfs for the age of Google. Are you still wondering why I’m reading it?

Memorial Day means the beginning of summer. Summer means— among other things like baseball— summer vacations. J. Maarten Troost’s harrowing and hillarious two-year odyssey in the South Pacific is my most recent indulgence in travel books.

James McManus writes about sex, drugs, murder, Amarillo Slim, the history of cards, and the psychology of gambling. He does all of this using the vocabulary of no-limit Texas hold’em. Mick recommended this non-fiction book to me; I am quite grateful that he did. It does not hurt any that he is a White Sox fan— McManus, that is. Mick is a Cubs fan. I do not hold that against him.

A collection of first person accounts of backpacking through Europe. It has been fifteen years since my poor treks through southern and central Europe. This book takes me back to that time. I forged friendships through a multi-language political debate on a nighttime ferry crossing of the Aegean during the Perseid meteor shower– among many other fond and whimsical adventures.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize winning novel is this spring’s selection for the Chicago Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago” program. Fierce, uncompromising and haunting– a relentless indictment of political oppression.

“You shouldn’t read it if you cannot take a punch.” – Ernest Hemingway on Nelson Algren’s writing. This twelve thousand word prose poem is Chicago’s magnum opus.

Dan Brown’s thriller marries an international murder to curious esoteria culled from centuries of Western history. It reminds me of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum— in that this is precisely the sort of book Eco satirized so well. Promise me you will remember it is a common work of fiction.