couldreads

The Maze Runner: A little bit of chafing

When you’re training for a half-marathon, there’s something fabulously appropriate about reading a book whose main foil is an unsolvable maze populated by murderous robot slugs. Even if that book reads like it’s meant for someone 15 years your junior. Even if that’s because, in fact, it is.

Someone mentioned The Maze Runner to me months ago, probably in the midst of a me-initiated conversation about dystopian young adult fiction, for which I have an affinity. “Teenagers Fight to Survive Against Unseen All-Powerful Forces” is one of my favorite sections in the bookstore.

Nor does it hurt that TMR already has a movie adaptation in the works, slated for release in September and starring Teen Wolf’s Dylan O’Brien, who I hereby dub the world’s next Adam Brody. As far as suggestible and easily enamored 12- to 17-year-olds go—and intellectually lazy 28-year-olds—The Maze Runner has all the makings of a runaway success. MOVE OVER, PEETA.

The gist is this: Thomas wakes up in The Box, a dark metal container that delivers him to The Glade, a clearing at the center of maze in which a group of young-to-teenage boys has been living for nearly two years, trying to solve said maze in the hopes of escaping. None of the boys, including Thomas, remember what’s outside The Glade, or who they are, and each month a new boy arrives. Until one day a girl shows up in The Box, bearing a message: She’ll be the last.

It’s always crummy in Philadelphia

wendy-ruderman-barbara-laker-busted-book

In some ways, Busted is about Philadelphia, the city in which authors Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker expose a corrupt ring of police officers while reporting for the bankrupt Philadelphia Daily News. After all, it is Philly’s abandoned houses and resigned drug pushers who serve as the backdrop to Ruderman and Laker’s investigation. It is the City of Brotherly Love that offers up Busted’s memorable characters: Benny, the informant-turned-source who raises the first red flag about a Philly narcotics cop; George Bochetto, that cop’s combative and boxing-obsessed attorney; Jose Duran, a local bodega owner whose innovative surveillance system turns the women on to a series of store lootings by police officers. It’s not that Busted couldn’t have taken place outside of Philly—corruption is nothing if not equal-opportunity—but Philadelphia is very much a presence in the book, a city of both blight and beauty, struggle and charm.

More than anything, though, Busted is about journalism, about how the seismic shift in media over the last decade has played out at your average metropolitan daily, and for your average (and increasingly unemployed) newspaper reporter. The book is not so much a call to arms as a window into reality, a frank look at how the real work of reporting—already up against online aggregation and viral cat videos—is doubly challenged by the newspaper industry’s rapid desiccation.

Pack me in an apple and smoke me when I die. We’ve got the environment to think about

There are times—like every day ending in ‘y’ and if they invented a new day that somehow didn’t end in y, probably that one too—when I need to chill out. Relative to the stability I see in others, I’m wired just a bit too tightly, the kind of person who has day-nightmares about burglars and apartment fires, and spends her evenings compiling color-coordinated To Do lists. It was only in the last few years—despite a lifelong affinity for Fern Gully—that I stopped rewriting notes every time I had to cross a word out. I mean, even my Post-its have Post-its.

Given my propensity for worry, I have always seen Willie Nelson as something of an ideal, a man so simultaneously successful and laid back that one finds it hard to believe he’s aware of his own fame. Indeed, the music legend’s latest book, a short compendium of lyrics, essays and random thought bubbles called Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, cedes both space and heart to many members of Nelson’s large family, and those who have been with him throughout his career. Roll Me Up is as much a massive Acknowledgments section as it is a standalone title, and the correlation between Nelson’s placid exterior and the size of his support network is hard to ignore.

How to read safely in a science fictional universe

how-to-live-safely-in-a-science-fictional-universe-book-cover-01

After finishing Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, I can honestly say that I’m still not sure how to life safely in a science fictional universe. Whether this is a failing of the book’s contents or its title (or both or neither) I’ll let you decide.

Charles Yu, time travel technician/narrator of HTLSSFU (not to be confused with…or TO be confused with? Charles Yu our author) lives in Minor Universe 31, a universe in which “reality represents 13 percent of the total surface area [and] the remainder consists of a standard composite based SF substrate.” Which is to say – science fiction.

Blondes have less fun

Everything you need to know about Allie Brosh comes in the first paragraph of Hyperbole and a Half:

“Here is a re-creation of a drawing I did when I was five. It’s a guy with one normal arm and one absurdly fucking squiggly arm. What you can’t see is that in the original, the squiggly arm continues for the entire length of a roll of butcher paper. It started on one end and then just kept going until I ran out of paper.”

I’m listening…

While HAAH is Brosh’s first book, it is primarily a collection of pieces from her blog of the same name, itself a fabulous diary of essays/comics featuring Brosh as a crudely drawn but adorably emotive version of herself. In HAAH the book, Brosh’s essays cover everything from her encounter with a goose-perpetrated home invasion to the time she ate her grandfather’s entire birthday cake before his party, just to spite her mother…and to eat cake.