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Delicious Foods, subpar parental leave

In several major ways, James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods sets itself up for failure. After all, the book’s main character, Eddie, is discovered in its first sentence spearheading his own vehicular escape from a farm—but has no hands. No matter how the rest of Hannaham’s second novel plays out, it is from the inaugural page a story catching up to a conclusion, a narrative climax in pursuit of rising action.

On top of starting at the end, Hannaham also employs a narrator I wouldn’t normally indulge: Scotty, also known as crack-cocaine, who relays the story of Eddie and his mother, the Scotty-addicted Darlene, as though opining on the circumstances of old friends—which, in some respects, Darlene kind of is. Wry and observant, Scotty is the anchor of this ambitious book, the slice of novelty that cuts through even its most tedious moments.

I was wrong, The 5th Wave is not a British boy band

There isn’t much to say about Rick Yancey’s The 5th Wave that hasn’t been said before, about The Hunger Games or Divergent, The Maze Runner or The Age of Miracles, The Host or Station Eleven. Unsung hero teen becomes front-and-center protagonist in the wake of a world-ending catastrophe. Family and friends are lost, heroic survival efforts are embarked upon, challenges are faced, romances are forged. Things end inconclusively, not simply because such is the way of the post-apocalyptic world, where there are no guarantees, except that at least one of your fellow survivors is likely to be an attractive potential soulmate. Things end inconclusively because there has to be something left for the sequel.It should surprise zero people that T5W kept cropping up in my Amazon recommendations—for all the same reasons The OC keeps pushing itself at me on Netflix (like, back up Seth Cohen! I’ll watch when I’m good and ready-slash-bored). The 2013 novel, whose sequel was released in 2014 and third/final volume comes out in May, is already a big-budget movie starring a slew of wholesome-looking teenagers, plus also Liev Schreiber. T5W takes place in the wake of alien invasion: A mothership has been hovering above earth for years, unleashing wave after wave of human-race-extinguishing catastrophes, from natural disaster to disease. Those who remain are true survivors, and yet remain perpetually felled by the distrust The Others have sowed between them. Who is good? Who is dangerous? Who is human? You know, typical first-date questions.

Add Into Thin Air to your blizzard bookshelf

If I compiled a reverse bucket list of the dramatic experiences I have no intention of achieving before I die, climbing Mount Everest would surely be on it. Barely a fan of snow, I can’t see myself willingly combining it with wind, upper-body strength and bottomless ice crevasses. (To say nothing of oxygen deprivation; I can barely catch my breath after a particularly steep set of subway stairs.) Which is all to say that Into Thin Air, John Krakauer’s landmark accounting of the 1996 Everest disaster, is about as relatable to me as as a deep-sea diver’s description of the ocean floor, or an astronaut’s of the surface of the moon. I might as well be watching Interstellar.

I picked up Into Thin Air during last month’s blizzard: It seemed apropos to read about the extreme life goals of others while rendered inert by a mere foot of snow in Brooklyn. But Krakauer’s detailed relating of the Everest disaster—which left eight people dead after a blizzard that caught dozens of climbers on summit day—reaffirmed my snow-hermit tendencies in more ways than one. If this is as close to Everest as I ever come, I’m okay with it.

Say hello to My Brilliant Friend

For as many guys as I have been friends with over as many years, I reluctantly maintain that there is something uniquely intimate about a close friendship between women. It is inevitably a companionship against the world, a kinship based on shared experience and perspective and mutual trust as regards an ever-expanding litany of secret thoughts and hopes and fears. Perhaps it is because of this almost inherent intensity that lady BFF relationships are also so often fraught, so frequently burdened by unspoken resentments or unfounded suspicions, by anger or envy. Women know what they’re up against in the world, and sometimes it’s easy to forget who’s on your side.

I haven’t read many novels that truly capture the complexity of these friendships—I’m sure they’re out there, I just haven’t read them—but it’s hard not to feel that in My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante has done it better than most. The story of Elena and Lila, childhood pals who grow up together in 1950s Naples, is the story of so many fast friends, girls who share dolls and schoolbooks but soon find themselves competing for attention, validation and approval. Here, there is the added backdrop of a place and time in which women were held to the highest moral standard and the lowest intellectual one. To advance one’s education at all, let alone as a girl, was far from a given.

Three book that say it’s all downhill after college

Screen Shot 2015-11-18 at 1.06.09 AM — Good times were had.

A mere six months into my 30s, I find myself already looking back on college with the same abstract nostalgia one might apply to say…fax machines. Like, wasn’t that so neat at the time? How you could totally put a sheet of paper with stuff on it into a machine and then a machine somewhere else would, moments later, spit out an identical sheet of paper with identical stuff on it? That was cool. Good times were had. Documents were faxed. But now is better: We have email now. Cell phones. AirDrop. Dropbox. The cloud. And if all else fails, the NSA.

I loved college; I made some of my best friends there. College was the last time one could wear pajama pants in public, or don costumes for spontaneously invented themed drinking nights, or go for second helpings of frozen yogurt at no additional charge. But I also enjoy being an adult, and I know—in whatever corner of my brain isn’t penetrated by models and actresses and the implications of every movie and television show ever—that being young is for the birds. Being young is like fax machines: Wasn’t it neat when you could say “I’m going to hit up three different parties tonight” and then you would actually do it? That was cool. Good times were had. But now is better: Now it’s happy hour and then a good night’s sleep.