Last Wednesday at the State Theatre, David Sedaris read a story about driving on the road and encountering a car with a “McCain/Palin ’08” bumper sticker, and how scary it is to drive past the car and realize that the person in the driver’s seat appears normal.         

“They walk among us,” he whispered in horror. “Like Canadians.”

Last Sunday, Buffalo Street Books (formerly The Bookery II) hosted its third Works-In-Progress reading for ten local writers. This was an opportunity for the writers to gauge the audience’s reaction to their unpublished prose and verse. For the audience packed into the small front room, the reading was a marvelous display of diverse talents.

Chuck Palahniuk’s publishers initially rejected Invisible Monsters because they believed the novel was too perverse for the then mostly conservative American audience. Instead, the company published Fight Club, which was later adapted into a movie — wait… oops, forgot the rule: “don’t talk about fight club.”

Vladimir Nabokov’s posthumous The Original of Laura, released nationwide today, is marketed as “A Novel in Fragments.” A more accurate title may have been “Fragments of a Novel” — as a collection of detachable notecards with little continuity, they represent only the bare outlines of the master’s final, unfinished work.

I spent the warm week of spring break in Ithaca, lounging around in shorts and reading trashy best-sellers. Having read some positive reviews of the book The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz (Vintage Contemporaries, 2009), I decided to armchair travel to the royal compound in Japan.

Sarah Jefferis’s collection, Forgetting the Salt, is filled with full-bodied, no-nonsense poems, some of which read slow and detailed, full of causality and precision, and others which rush the reader through as if on a “water slide” of images and sounds. The stories and characters, and specifically the way in which the information about them unfurls throughout the collection, are so compelling, they should be left to discovery of the reader. Clues about the speaker’s mother’s Laundromat, her discovery of various facets of her sexuality and of the “grief on the hip bone / of fear” which has been present in her life, are dropped throughout the collection.

After suffering through years of history lessons about the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Winthrop’s role in shaping his “city upon a hill,” one would think that (yet another) novel on the subject would be a less exciting read than the New York City phone book.

Sarah Vowell’s newest novel about the Puritans’ stateside adventures, however, is a pleasant anomaly in the catalogue of history books about 17th century New Englanders. Witty and cheeky in the face of Puritan sobriety, Vowell interprets excerpts of our forefathers’ diaries and doctrines to reveal a society more complex than our history books have taught us.

With chapter titles from “Grillin’ Like a Villain” to “How Sweet It Ends,” George Duran’s unique cookbook sets out to take comfort food to a new, decidedly unexpected level. While the recipes may not make for the most appetizing sounding dishes (potato chip Spanish tortillas?), the book is, overall, well written and interesting.

Duran explains right off the bat his penchant for fried foods, and even goes so far as to list some of his favorites: fried pickles, fried strawberries, fried olives, etc. As Duran himself writes, “You can fry all of these things. The question is, should you?” In my opinion, you should not, so the enormous amount of fried food in the cookbook was a bit off-putting. Once past the initial grease, however, there are delicious recipes to be found.

While I really do love “chick lit,” I strongly believe that it has two distinct categories: the good and the really, really bad. Unfortunately, the newest novel from Lauren Weisberger ’99, Chasing Harry Winston, falls in the latter category. Yes, Weisberger is a Cornell alumna, so I feel terrible about trashing her work. But let that go to show just how unfortunate the book is, because I am going to trash it anyway.

Combine science fiction with romance and you have Stephanie Meyer’s first adult fiction novel. The Host concentrates on what it means to be human in the wake of a foreign invasion.

We’ve all heard the alien conspirators, the paranoid people who believe that the Earth is under attack and people are being abducted. This novel shows what would happen if those conspiracy nuts were right all along. Not just another extraterrestrial science fiction conundrum, we see the story through the eyes of one of these aliens, forcing a perhaps unwanted sympathy. By constructing this point of view, Meyer turns the violence and animalistic nature of humans into a dualistic package.