MATTHEW SPECKTOR
on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.

The devil on my left shoulder whispers this: “Bird Cloud” is an especially off-putting book about a wealthy and imperious writer who annoys the local residents (she runs off their cows), overwrites about nature and believes people will sympathize with her about the bummers involved in getting her Japanese soaking tub, tatami-mat exercise area, Mexican talavera sink and Brazilian floor tiles installed just so. “Bird Cloud” is shelter porn with a side of highbrow salsa. When Ms. Proulx’s house turns out to be a bit of a folly, its roads impassable in winter, you feel that a bell somewhere has been struck, and justice served.

Peeling Away Theories on Gender and the Brain

Adam Phillips reviews Gary Greenberg's MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION

http://bit.ly/5DaLOA *Wow, a 2009 fiction list full of stuff I've never heard of that I'd actually like to read.

VanderMeer's Booklife: excellent guide to living the writerly life in the 21st Cen http://tinyurl.com/ygkpv7k

Freakonomics Sequel Gets Climate Change Wrong - http://bit.ly/xY7e1 getting things this wrong is not v. helpful, particularly now

How SuperFreakonomics Gets Climate Engineering Wrong: The new book Superfreakonomics... http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/24274/

The Snake Detection Theory posits a fascinating relationship between serpents and primates

By the time J. G. Ballard died in April of this year, talk of his long struggle with cancer should have prepared his followers (“fans” is too pale a word for the devotion Ballard inspired), yet the news still came as a shock. Ballard was, unmistakably, a literary futurist, at ease in the cold ruins of the millennium a lifetime sooner than the rest of us; his passing registered as a disorienting claim of time upon the timeless. Whether you embrace or reject on his behalf the label “science-fiction writer” will indicate whether you regard it as praiseful or damning, but no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect or the stark visionary consistency of the motifs that earned him that rarest of literary awards, an adjective: Ballardian. Now, and not a moment too soon, comes The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (Norton, $35), a staggering 1,200-page collection of a lifetime’s labors in the medium in which Ballard was perhaps most at home.

William Leith reviews Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

on pogo

Shubin’s basic proposition is encapsulated in what he calls the biological “law of everything”: that every living thing on the planet has parents. This innocuous, quite banal statement conceals a great profundity: that no structure in the living wor

The story of how the earth's age was determined has much to tell us about the nature of scientific discovery, its geniuses and its aberrations

Slate picks the best books of 2007.

[anne fadiman]

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 624 pp., $30.

on 'gentlemen of the road'

Jo Walton

From Fidel Castro to Germaine Greer, Philip Roth to Alice Sebold, The Observer's literary team pick this autumn's top 10 must-reads

review of book by Kary Mullis (pcr)

reviewed by Lionel Shriver

review site for mysteries

Nicola Griffith - Aud Torvingen