If Tyler Cowen, Austin Kleon, and Ben Casnocha all recommend a book, I don't really need another nudge. I loooooooved Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Two structural things you don't see very often in fiction: it's written in the second person, and the novel's chapter titles and general format are plays on the self-help genre ("Move to the City", "Get an Education", "Don't Fall in Love"). In the story, the protagonist (uh..."you") is a third-world scrub who gradually climbs his way up the social ladder. I really appreciated the perspective on economics and daily life in a world that that's not all that familiar. Some favorite parts:

You read a self-help book so someone who isn't yourself can help you, that someone being the author.

Some understated humor on receiving bad news:

You take this news as well as possible, which is to say you do not die.

So much awesome imagery and color in this one. As in this classroom scene, where students look on as one of their classmates gets on the wrong side of their teacher:

They watch in horrified fascination, like seals on a rock observing a great white breaching beneath one of their own, just a short swim away.

On becoming a parent:

Fatherhood has taught you the lesson that, even in middle age, love is practicable. It is possible to adore those newly come into your world, to envision, no matter how late in the day, a happily entwined future with those who have not been part of your past.

On books:

Writers and readers seek a solution to the the problem that time passes, that those of us who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

On taking out a business loan:

With borrowed funds, a business can invest, gain leverage, and leverage is a pair of wings. Leverage is flight. Leverage is a way for small to be big and big to be huge, a glorious abstraction, the promise of tomorrow today, yes, a liberation from time, the resounding triumph of human will over dreary, chronology-shackled physical reality.

That passage hints at what's particularly hard to capture: the restless energy in this book. It just keeps coming and coming, so much invention, and it's so fun to read. I wouldn't be surprised if I reread this one soon.

Somewhere around Christmastime I fell into a massive reading rut. What I was reading was no fun, and there was nothing better out there, and there never would be. Everything was in ruins. Then I read this book. And for the past couple months, I've been on one of those glorious hot streaks where just about everything I've read has been fun, and the stuff that wasn't I dropped without second thought. Coincidence? I have to give some credit to leaving behind the cold, dark, depressing winter, and stepping into the golden light of springtime... but Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction definitely deserves some credit, too. I like the tone of this one. It's like your at a smart friend's house, and he's reclining in a chair and talking at length. Some favorite parts... In an awesome footnote, relating to the "gateway drug" theory of lowbrow reading eventually leading to "better" books, an excerpt from Alex Rose:

In hindsight, this is obvious, but it's a really good, liberating reminder:

Timing is everything. And along the same lines of releasing the pressure on yourself, we're reminded that "Many books become more boring the faster you read them" and that "All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention." I also liked this excerpt from Auden about thinking about how we evaluate the stuff we read:

If you find yourself in a reading rut, maybe this one will help you get out, too. Recommended.

This is a pretty fun collection. Charles Yu's Third Class Superhero has some good light scifi/speculative influences, along with a George Saunders-ian blend of dark but sympathetic takes on modern everyday life (cf. "the Capitalized Phrases, offering entry into an Exclusive Club for People Who Get It"). It's fatalistic, but still curious. Goofiness pops up in the title story (read an extended excerpt):

Ladies and gentlemen, Moisture Man. One of my favorite stories was "401(k)", which has a tongue-in-cheek exploration of the treadmill of consumer society and life's template.

And later in the same story, a sequence on aging:

Maybe my favorite bit in the whole book, a poke at how we think about travel:

This kind of writing – where skills of observation meet clever exaggeration – is just so fun:

My other favorite story is probably "32.05864991%", which explores "why men are such terrible emotional statisticians", and the existing of two different Englishes – "the language of the wanted and the language of the one doing the wanting.", and what exactly "maybe" means. I love this bit that touches on nervousness and superstition:

Good stuff.