Dibs

Defying all apparent indicators of dorkdom — the author is a middle-aged professor; the book’s title is “A Love Affair with the Sea” — this memoir by a British marine biologist recounting his research and adventures around the world is limned with joltingly gorgeous writing and hilarious observations that will leave you flopping and panting [...]

“Ambassador Osama bin Laden” is welcomed with open arms to New York City in a crazed fantasy-future America that suffers under “oppression by ultra-liberal extremists” who let the United Nations control the US government. Osama secretly plans to nuke the Big Apple on 9/11’s twentieth anniversary. Who can save us? Only a biomechanically engineered Sean [...]

In today’s weird book news … there’s a crisis in the stuffed-animal industry! Plump squashy stuffed toys (which our Brit pals call “plush toys”) are expensive to transport and hard to keep clean in stores where disgusting little fingers streak them with effluent, according to a man whose company has spent ten years “developing products [...]

According to news reports today, Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library are teaming up to make 300,000 e-books — electronic digitized texts that you read on your computer screen instead of curled up on the couch — available for free between July 4 and August 4. That’s a lot of reading material to squeeze into [...]

Admit it — if you aren’t seventysomething yet, sometimes you wish you were, because then you could get away with speaking truth to power whenever the bloody hell you felt like it: either because no one would dare to punch a silver-haired dissenter in the mouth, because the elderly have acquired a lifetime of confidence [...]

A disgruntled lawyer in the waning years of California’s dot-com boom, Walton discovered eBay. An old army buddy taught him how to buy cheap art at thrift shops and sell it on the site for thousands. Greed got the better of both men as they began forging famous artists’ signatures’ onto paintings — when one [...]

A Canadian interior designer in France’s romantic, castle-studded Dordogne region hunts for her twin sister, who disappeared twenty years previous without a trace while hunting for orchids. It’s a teensy bit predictable, but Wan’s careful attention to character development makes this mystery novel fairly chewy beach reading for those with a penchant for flowers, France, [...]