[A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday through September. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird when I was twelve years old. I read it for the same reason most twelve-year-olds do: it’s standard fare in middle-school literature classes. A compelling look at the south pre-Civil-Rights, it focused enough on outsiderness to trick my nerdy twelve-year-old self into believing it was just as interesting as the X-Men comics filling my bookshelves. Because, you know, they were the bar for judgment, not that silly Pulitzer Prize nonsense.

I just plain skipped school for most of seventh grade, feigning migraines to get out of going to the mid-sized North Georgian junior high that I despised. As a result, I was “homeschooled” for eighth, which generally meant my parents left me alone in the house with an Algebra 2 textbook and a mail-order encyclopedia on world history. My father would suggest books for me to read, ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Stranger. We didn’t really have a system in place for judging my reading comprehension; instead, my parents, both math types, liked to regale me with stories of their own high school English classes, where they read the first and last chapters of books and nothing else. (Note that I believe these tactics are generally frowned upon by serious homeschoolers.) …
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[In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it from the Special Features page.]

Lights Out in Wonderland, by DBC Pierre, reviewed by Alan Warner (Guardian)

I’m unspeakably excited for the new DBC Pierre novel. I loved his debut, Vernon God Little, and I was one of the few who liked his sophomore effort, Ludmilla’s Broken English. So I didn’t read this review past the subhead (“Alan Warner is impressed by DBC Pierre’s fast and furious satire on contemporary decadence”) in the interest of not spoiling a single bit of the book. This profile of Pierre is pretty safe, though. The only bogey on the radar: Wonderland still doesn’t have a release date in the U.S.

Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, by Lewis Hyde, reviewed by Robert Darnton (New York Times)

A few weeks ago, I got in a Facebook fight about the recent rash of library closings around the country—I argued that free access to all the world’s knowledge should be considered a human right in any industrialized nation. Hyde, in Common as Air, goes a step further: he uses the writings of America’s founding fathers to argue that all “knowledge is ‘common property.’” Hyde digs into intellectual property law and the thorny issue of copyright, Hollywood and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Mickey Mouse. It’s an excellent review of what sounds like an excellent book.

The Nearest Exit, by Olen Steinhauer, reviewed by Paula L. Woods (L.A. Times)

Woods says, “Olen Steinhauer makes another bid to be the espionage writer for our times with ‘The Nearest Exit.’” Strong words, and while the premise seems a bit familiar (hero searches for X amidst shadows), there are a few inventive details, like the “Department of Tourism,” which is really a division of the CIA. The real power of the novel, Woods says, comes from its willingness to ask deeper questions about the people who are asked to sacrifice—and sometimes to do horrible things—for “the greater good.”

Phantom Noise, by Brian Turner, reviewed by Courtney Cook (Washington Post)

The Hurt Locker was based on a poem? Evidently yes, and its writer is back with another collection of wartime poetry. Cook says this of the two collections: “Taken together, these books are an unusual two-part portrait of a decade of war: its strength, its wounds, its fantasies of home and, as it happens, the strange beauty of a stubbornly foreign culture.” Sounds good to me.

City of Veils, by Zoë Ferraris, reviewed by Diane White (Boston Globe)

Some of my favorite mysteries are set in far-off lands with exotic, entirely foreign cultures. The last few of these I’ve read—this one set in Thailand, and this one set in India—have disappointed, but even when the mystery is crap, you’ve at least got an interesting semi-travelogue. Ferraris’s new mystery—her second—is set in Saudi Arabia, with its brutally strict laws and savagely misogynistic attitude. White calls Ferraris “a formidably talented writer,” and says her characters are “utterly human.”

[Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use, or volunteer to write a blurb, by emailing us here.]

JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, The Interrogative Mood, by Padget Powell. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)

1.) Peter Grey had a back like a question mark. No one ever thought he would amount to anything. But one day Gray decided if you can’t beat it, embrace it–or rather de-brace it. Upon throwing away his back brace and any attempt at improving his physical condition, Grey does what would have never occurred to anyone who ever saw him: works manual labor in the tight spaces of a Pennsylvania coal mine. Knowing his fellow workers are not built for the narrow mines like he is, he spends the little off time he has not building a family, but fighting for the rights of his fellow miners. Peter Gray becomes the greatest labor advocate of the Twentieth Century that no one ever heard of. In the end, there is no question about the upright nature of Gray.

2.) All Sam can remember is that she has a family, somewhere. But who then is she living with now? She knows she has lived and worked where she has for years; she has memories.  Yet each morning she awakes beside a husband-stranger  with an ineffable feeling that the life she lives is not her own. How can one even begin to search for the impossible?

3.) Are your emotions pure? Are you leaving now? Would you? Would you mind? Thoughtful, cajoling and absurdist, Powell’s book of random non sequiturs are not without their method, sounding some tenderly recurring themes, such as a middle-aged ruefulness for simpler times, a longing for more elegant forms in clothes, tools, cars and looks and a tenderness for elephants, dogs and children. Are you bothered by your cowardice? Hilarity, irony, and sheer perverseness vie to question essentially what we know and how what we know makes us what we are.

4.) It’s a matter of inflection; with the right emphasis, facts become questions. Jasper Carl owns an art gallery in Greenwich Village, a proven testing ground for young up-and-coming abstract painters. Now, pressured by divorce, financial ruin, and a mysterious art dealer pushing his unheard of client with soft threats, Jasper must wrestle with some hard questions he has tried to ignore for years, questions about how he rose to his present place in life, and how he staid there.

5.) Is there a book by Padget Powell written entirely in hypothetical questions? Will it chronicle the intellectual and emotional awakening of one New York City Town Clerk as she begins to question her world? What will she discover as she interrogates her friends, family, former lovers, and even her own memories? Where will these questions, and their answers, lead her? And just who is leaving the notes underneath her door each night, prompting her interrogation with the riddles posed in each? Why are the questions taking on a terrifying menace as they become more personal, and threatening? Can she survive The Interrogative Mood?

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[This is a new semi-regular feature wherein we'll highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it from the Special Features page.]

Percival’s Planet, by Michael Byers, reviewed by Suzanne Berne (New York Times)

Ms. Berne’s review is mostly plot and character summary, but luckily Byer’s plot and characters are quite interesting. The novel is a work of historical fiction telling the story of a Kansas farm boy who discovered Pluto. Berne’s description–”Mr. Byers reminds us that whether we’re gripped by desire for a new planet or for another human being, that yearning has dignity and its own strange logic”–makes this sound like a maybe-too-literary book, but the characters seem quirky enough that that may not be the case.

A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things, by C.K. Williams, (Publisher’s Weekly)

PW doesn’t credit their reviews, which are only about 100 words long. It be faster for you just to read this review yourself. (Excerpt: “A boy lives near a ‘regular, ordinary, standard sort of forest,’ except that along with the usual perils of cliffs, bears, snakes, and wolves, there’s also an actual, awful monster with a penchant for scaring children.”) This is a children’s book so 100 words is probably sufficient anyway; I wish I could have found an example of the illustrations on the internet.

The Four Fingers of Death, by Rick Moody, reviewed by Troy Patterson (New York Times)

In what seems to be a work in the tradition of Breakfast of Champions and Pale Fire, Rick Moody’s new novel is told by “a long-winded ham” and “sci-fi horror hack” named Montese Crandall, writing in a dystopian 2025. The Four Fingers of Death is presented as Crandall’s novelization of a 2025 remake of a real B-movie from 1963. When I read Patterson’s decription of Crandall as “a figure far more baffling than an unreliable narrator: an anti-reliable author,” I knew I wanted to read this book.

The Lady Matador’s Hotel, by Cristina Garcia, reviewed by Carolyn Alessio (Chicago Tribune)

Ms. Alessio’s well-written review does a fine job of describing how this novel “captures many of Guatemala’s funny and grim contradictions, and probes their often freighted origins.” The book takes place in an upscale hotel, during a time of political instability. Garcia’s strentgh seems to lie in her characters. The few Alessio deems “cartoonish” she asserts are countered “through her more complex guests at the hotel and use of a clever chorus.”

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen (Wall Street Journal)

Franzen’s name (and photo) has been everywhere this week, and Freedom is getting a lot of hype. The Corrections was pretty great, so hopefully this lives up to expectations. The WSJ (in a short article credited to “WSJ Staff”) rounded up a bunch of choice review quotes, so I linked to that. C4 will have its own review in a few weeks.

Two books down, six to go. Vote below for which of the six remaining books Nico should read and review for the site.  You can vote as much as you want, so feel free to punish him. Voting ends in a week. For those of you keeping score at home, I added a little scorecard to the very bottom of the post.

Vote which book Nico must read and review for C4

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Scorecard:

[I Loved This Book When... has to take a brief hiatus this week. It'll be back next Monday with new posts. In the meantime, this is a new semi-regular feature wherein we'll highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it from the Special Features page.]

Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith, reviewed by Olen Steinhauer (New York Times)

Three Stations is a short (243 pages) thriller set in Russia. Steinhauer says that Smith elevates the thriller to social criticism, and with such a small canvas, it’s easy to hope for a tight, small, beautiful knot of a novel. Although, Steinhauer also compares Smith’s hero to Stieg Larsson’s eponymous “girl” hero, which makes me wary—I don’t care for Larsson.

A Mountain of Crumbs, by Elena Gorokhova, reviewed by Kapka Kassabova (Guardian)

Kassabova makes A Mountain of Crumbs (which came out in January in the U.S.) sound like a charming, beautifully written book. It’s a memoir about Gorokhova’s life in Soviet Russia, but even the few brief passages quoted in this review feel novelistic—what that means for the book I’m not entirely sure.

The Glass Rainbow, by James Lee Burke, reviewed by Dick Lochte (L.A. Times)

Lochte reports that the new Burke is mostly the same old Burke (which is quite solid mystery, if you’ve never read him), with a few sprinkles of new stuff. This review is worth looking at just for the art that accompanies it—it’s about a thousand times better than the book’s actual cover.

Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach, reviewed by Peter Carlson (Washington Post)

This book bears all the fingerprints of Mary Roach, which Carlson is quite happy about (he calls her “America’s funniest science writer”). Packing for Mars sounds like a gross and hilarious account of the minutiae of space travel. The last Roach book, Bonk, was a C4 Great Read.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted, by Christie Hodgen, reviewed by Joanna Smith Rakoff (New York Times)

Hodgen’s second novel is a coming-of-age novel told in the second person, by the protagonist to the five people who made her who she is. Rakoff says the premise might seem obvious (sounds more cloying to me), but she claims “its execution proves deeply, satisfyingly original.” Sounds good.

[A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]

What follows is a sentence that nobody has written before, ever*:

Every time I hear Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” I think of Johnny Tremain.

When first presented with the phrase “I loved this book when,” my mind went straight to childhood. (As it usually does, being a not-ready-for-primetime adult.) I read a ton as a kid—the complete Hardy Boys, about 40% of Matt Christopher’s (100+) sports novels, the occasional Sweet Valley High, when I became curious about girls. But when I think of childhood books, Johnny Tremain marches straight to the front.

I reread it last week, and from the very first line—“On rocky islands gulls woke”—I knew this post would be based on a false premise: that I loved this book only at a specific time in my life. It’s just not true. I loved it as a child, I love it now, and I will always love it. In fact, if I hadn’t read Johnny Tremain, my life would probably look a lot different than it does now. …
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Mike is (better be) slogging through Never Deceive a Duke this very moment–thanks to everyone who voted.  For the next round, the field of titles is reduced by one. So, vote for one of the remaining titles and our own Marcos Velasquez will have no choice but to read and review it. The poll closes one week from today, and you can vote as much as you want. Have at.

Vote for which book Marcos must read and review for C4.

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[A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]

The first years of my life that I can remember were spent in a sunny apartment on the edge of campus in a small New Hampshire college town.  There was a big front porch we shared with the other families in our building, and a willow tree out back where the neighborhood kids gathered to start games of freeze tag.

Then, just before I started school, my family moved into a house farther out from the center of town.  You couldn’t see our closest neighbors through the trees, and they wouldn’t have heard you if you shouted.  The land behind us was part of a nature preserve, 163 acres of woods and wildlife.  It was quiet at night and dark.  There weren’t even any streetlights.

These are all things I love about the house I grew up in now, but I remember being scared of everything then, scared of the silence, scared when I heard a sound, scared of the dark woods at night, scared of the shadows beneath the trees in the day.  My parents didn’t have much experience in the outdoors, and neither was much help dispelling whatever terror I saw when I stared out our kitchen windows.  My mother worried about bears, and her worries only confirmed my belief that there was something out there. …
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[Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]

Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Morten Ramsland’s Doghead with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.

1.) Hampton J. Beagle is among the last of a dying breed. After spending his life steadily climbing the corporate ladder at the investment firm, Dogman Sacks–starting in the mail room and working his way to CEO–he now spends his days listening to the advice of entitled MBA’s who believe they know the corporate world better than he does. When he makes the decision to steer clear of an iffy real estate bubble, and invest instead in soup, dog food, and a company that makes ascots, Many of his underlings call for his resignation. Will Hampton be able to convince the board of his worth, or are his days as Top Dog numbered.

2.) Doghead is the bizarre saga of three generations of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. Patriarch Askild is a naval architect who becomes so obsessed with cubist art that his ship designs become cubist, which gets him fired by one shipyard after another until he’s forced to move to find work. It’s also the story of Askild’s wife, Bjork; their sons, Knut and Jug Ears; their nephew, Applehead; and their grandchildren. Although the book is often mordantly funny, its dominant themes can have overtones of tragedy: World War II; marital, generational, and class conflict; superstition; cruelty; violence; the absence of love; lack of communication; Scandinavian reserve; and sheer loopiness.

3.) A man wakes to find his head transplant has gone horribly awry. He now has the head of a dog. Needless to say, his life as a lowly zoo keeper will never be the same. But the world is never as it seems, as his new dog senses make perfectly clear. A funny romp through a zany world of humans, filtered through the mind of a simple, dogheaded man.

4.) Sofie Sorensen is riding high as VP of Affairs at one of Denmark’s top marketing firms — she may not be pretty, but she’s quickly becoming known as one of the best young minds in all of Copenhagen. But when NordMark hires Sven Jensen, a former classmate, to write copy, Sofie’s troubled past is unleashed. Newly haunted by her memories of being named head mutt in Sven’s “Doggie Pound Club,” Sofie slowly begins to lose her grip on her goals, her staff … and her hysterical hypertrichosis.

5.) Gnut is an ugly man. He was born that way. But that’s never deterred him when it comes to the ladies. Except one. Sera in an ex-pat from Brussels, and is immune to Gnut’s charms. So he determines to do anything to bed her, no matter how outrageous. This is a madcap novel full of twists and shenanigans. Brimming with hilarity and just a dash of wisdom, Doghead is the best novel to come out of Denmark in ages.

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