• The Green Hour, by The Autumn Defense
• Begin to Hope, by (the divine) Regina Spektor
• Jens Lekman
• Tufte
• Pivot Tables
• Google Earth
• Joe Mauer

‘The best-bred lunatics in England’ live in Clankwood, and Francis Beveridge is its newest resident. Rather than attending the asylum’s Saturday dances, though, Beveridge goes on the lam in London. And thus, when a traveling German noble finds himself at the luxurious Hotel Mayonnaise without a guide to England’s customs, who better to escort him than the amnesiac Englishman who materializes by his side - a splendid tutor in bringing rail stations to a standstill, the best way to fake a rabies attack, and how to crash London’s most exclusive clubs - quite literally.

A much-loved Victorian comic masterpiece, this is the original anarchic novel that ushered in the age of Wodehouse and Waugh.

The Collins Library is curated by Paul Collins, author of the excellent Banvard’s Folly. It is an imprint of McSweeneys Books specializing in obscure and weird titles.

This shot follows the Chicago River east into Lake Michigan and it shows the city in a completely different way than I’ve ever seen it. It looks like some European city emptying out into the Mediterranean or the Baltic Sea.

Next up are some non-fiction books, I’m afraid, that aren’t even on my list since they are work-related.

Incidentally, I’d like to point this out:

Two months into the season, I am in first place (however tenuously) in all three of my Yahoo leagues.

The Bryson book was kind of random, I’ll admit. It was entertaining but a little out of date, and the victim of the kind of sweeping generalizations you’d expect from a popular history of the English language.

The Golden is a vampire story with a great setting (a Gormenghastian castle) and a great plot (it’s a mystery), but Shepard’s writing is too overwrought to enjoy, and the climax drags on for far too long.

Stanley Elkin’s The Living End starts out as a humorous, satirical piece, but in its later section it becomes heavy and bizarre. It’s a meditation about life and death and the afterlife, and it’s a mess.

Woken Furies was not Morgan’s best, but it shows that Morgan has a great worldbuilding talent. I would love to read another story in this universe, but I am done with Takeshi Kovacs as a character. He’s a monster, and any depth he has as a person feels like an artificial attempt to, well, give him some depth as a person. The books would be far more effective and interesting if they were from the perspective of a less invincible, less obvious character.

Last but definitely not least, Jeff Ford’s short story collection contains some absolute gems. “Botch Town” is a sort of an anti-Dandelion Wine that at first felt very prosaic and out of place. But very quickly I found myself drawn into the inner life of the main character and the fascinating world he inhabits, and after 70 pages my only disappointment was that it was too short. The title story of the collection is another standout, and another favorite is the extremely weird and brutal story “The Beautiful Gelreesh.”