I read a lot of these when I was a kid and remembered thinking how strange the structure of the series was, because the first book is effectively a stand-alone novel about children living on their own and getting a happy ending by finding a home with their grandfather, and the appeal was how they managed to scrape by…

As a habitual Goodreads-user myself, no judgment! That's a great, thorough review. I think I'm more sympathetic to Joe than you are—I'd read him as a tremendously flawed man, admittedly terribly violent and bad-tempered, but one who did, despite all that, genuinely love Simon for Simon's own sake while being utterly…

I read that! Can you talk some more about the darkness you saw in the ending? I know a lot of people had trouble believing that the redemption process would really stick.

Adored Life After Life. I think the WWII bits worked well there in part because they weren't the focus—they may have been, in some ways, the point, but Atkinson knows we know the set-up and doesn't belabor it, and instead spends her time on Ursula personally.

I really love Scalzi's nonfiction, but Redshirts is a perfect example of how his fiction never quite hits the mark for me: it gets the breezy humor right, and the book is likable enough, but there's a profundity that he can hit in his deeper articles ("Being Poor," "The Child on the Train," for example) that he…

The emotional realism of Anna Karenina is just really, really beautiful, intense, and twisty: I've never read a novel so smart about the way love can turn to resentment and yet stay love.

Currently: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, my first (I know, I know) John le Carre. It's as fascinating and precise as you would expect.

As soon as I saw this picture, I freaked out with delight over finally being able to watch that movie—based purely on King's talk about it in Danse Macabre, I'm prepared for something amazing.

I'm partway through Prison Noir, myself. It's fairly strong: occasionally the writing is a little clumsy, but there's a lot of power there. (It's interesting that Joyce Carol Oates explains in the foreword that there are several prison creative writing programs that they could not get submissions from because the…

A ton of Roger Ebert reviews from the mini e-book collections, of which the best is absolutely the collection of some of his favorite noir reviews. And while we're on the subject—Lindsay Hunter's trailer park noir Ugly Girls, about two teenage girls entangled with an online predator, their own reckless behavior, and…

That's a great way to start. I like The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes a lot, but The Martian Chronicles has prose I can just sink into—and for all that graceful writing, some of them still pack a real punch, especially "There Will Come Soft Rains."

I think NOS4A2 is his most King-esque work: Heart-Shaped Box is a little grittier than King tends to be, with a more unsympathetic (at least at first) set of protagonists. The plot has King-like elements, but the tone of the novel, overall, seems to be doing something different.

20th Century Ghosts really is a great and varied collection: "Pop Art" is imaginative and weird and deeply, deeply sweet and "My Father's Mask" is Kelly Link's "The Specialist's Hat"-trippy and disturbing. Love it.

Prime fades in and out pretty badly for me, but if you have a good local library system, you might find the first two seasons there—that's how I watched them. (Libraries tend to be underrated as a source of DVDs, but mine are usually pretty good—however, can't speak for everyone's, obviously.)

I feel like one of the things that makes this show so amazing is that it combines small-scale and epic-scale storytelling effortlessly, with both picking up energy and stakes from each other and snowball inexorably together, so that the battle of whether or not to recruit Paige plays out not just in the gunplay of…

I'm at work, but there was much squirming in my chair in lieu of dancing. So excited. I only started watching recently—sped through the first two seasons and am now impatiently watching episode-by-episode—and S4 will be the first season where I can actively AV Club comment from beginning to end. Until now, I've…

If You Could See Me Now is underrated, in my opinion: it's a great "man returns to backwater community" novel where the problem isn't where you think it is. And his novella "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff" is a terrific Bartleby rewrite.

It's also interesting how—not within all the identities, but within many of them—there are similarities in how these differences are parsed both within society and within the families and the self, like the tension between pride/identity and social assimilation. I do tend to find some of his conclusions a little pat,…

I finished the schizophrenia chapter last night and some of it was definitely heartbreaking, especially the man who was put on workable medication but was forced (by the clinician's illness and lack of replacement) to go without it for four days, with led to a complete relapse and him severely beating his grandfather…

The book at least has a lot of other voices to surround his (which is occasionally glib in the text, so it doesn't surprise me that he sounds that way in interviews, too). It's not there often enough to be more than a pebble in the shoe (at least not for right now), but I can totally see why coming across him just…