This Book Is Funny: Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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If you ask a bookseller about a novel and they say, “It’s really funny,” you needn’t read that book. It’s bookseller-speak for “this book has little else going for it,” the literary equivalent of a good personality.
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Immersive Vicarious Dining: Cooking from A Feast of Ice and Fire

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I suppose it’s a gift of modern life that I was able to cook, host, and eat the night’s feast. It’s more likely that when book six comes out I’ll spend a good deal of time yelling at the characters to thank their chefs.
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How To Introduce an Author

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Should a beloved, Pulitzer Prize-winning author have to hear the president of Northwestern’s Jewish students’ society call him Michael Sha-BONE 8 times in 2 minutes? No. Because he flew across the country to speak for 50 minutes in your overheated auditorium and you have the internet.
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Staff Pick: Lauren Groff’s Arcadia

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Sometimes I just want to read a book from beginning to end as quickly as possible. Arcadia was perfect for this venture, both because I was immediately in love with it, and because the book itself is about experiences that wrap around you until the outside world fades away.
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The Camaraderie of the Underrated: JC Gabel Relaunches The Chicagoan

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Chicago! We’ve got this great chef, and an amazing architect, and these cool music guys, and really good coffee!
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Play It Again: Neal Stephenson’s Reamde

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Every video game has a guiding story. “PLUMBER’S GIRLFRIEND CAPTURED BY APE!” was the original game story, and they have evolved from that into worlds of moral quandary.
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Loving a Monster: Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

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Imagine Sophia from The Golden Girls in Soviet Russia - spewing insults, exaggerating her own worth, bemoaning the state of things. Instead of being surround by three salty dames who deflect her barbs with their own, she’s surrounded by a husband, daughter, and granddaughter whose will to live she has methodically trampled.
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Conversations with Cocktails: Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility

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It’s reminiscent of Fitzgerald or Waugh, in that “what gay parties we all had in those days, until our inner demons simply couldn’t be repressed any longer” vein.
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A Visit to Gettysburg

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The Gettysburg gaze is a particular brand of narration that pervades the town, describing every skirmish as good vs. good. Good wins.
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A Thousand and One Knights: George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons

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Seabiscuit wasn’t about a horse. You don’t have to like football to love Friday Night Lights. A great narrative is great in any genre, and A Song of Ice and Fire is perhaps the most compelling, fully realized narrative in modern literature.
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The Three Worlds of Jesse Ball’s The Curfew

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Much of Ball’s writing takes place in worlds that are slightly off, where the rules of society have been changed, and both the characters in these worlds and we, the readers, aren’t entirely clear what the new rules are. I’ve never felt oriented in one of Ball’s novels, but I’m quite sure I’m not meant to.
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Mad, Mad World: Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test

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With 40 being the highest score, the psychopath range starts in the mid-20s, but really, I don’t want you feeding my cat if you get more than 10 (although, to be frank, I just gave my cat a 22).
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A Scarred World: George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones

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While his world looks like fantasy (bastards! dwarves! whores! knights!), and the action revolves around the question of the seven kingdoms’ throne, the focus is on the clashing relationships and motivations of the people involved in the struggle.
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Aloha, Imperialism: Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes

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This double-sided approach - a keen insight into the forces of history combined with an appreciative delight in the coincidental – is so unmistakably her own it might as well be called Vowelling.
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