Len Vlahos
Survivor
by Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk's follow-up to his critically acclaimed novel Fight Club -- is another tale of social alienation, this time satirizing the whole notion of celebrity. While not quite as smart or clever as Fight Club, Survivor is still a gripping narrative. It follows the story of Tender Branson, the sole survivor of a suicidal religious cult, who goes from a life of indentured servitude to mass celebrity to pure anarchy. I wasn't able to put it down. Mr. Palahniuk's unique voice stands out in contemporary fiction as one who is not afraid to challenge our sensibilities.

Eric Wallenstein
Angelhead: A Memoir
by Greg Bottoms
After dropping six hits of acid at an Ozzy Ozbourne concert, the author's older brother Michael sees the face of God. But that's just the beginning. From there, Michael slips even further. He talks to his pet snakes, obsessively reads the Bible, hears voices, and becomes a violent threat to everything and everyone around him. Later, after Michael is diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia, he receives medication but continues to terrorize his family, and even attempts to burn down their house. It's an unsettling read all right, but it's more than worth the effort. Thankfully, in Bottoms' hands, the story avoids the standard movie-of the-week clichés that generally plague memoirs of mental illness. And without any easy moralizing, Bottoms' clean, hard-hitting prose truly shines.

Scott Nafz
Night Shift
by Stephen King
It was about 22 years ago that I read my first bit of Stephen King. This was, in particular, "Graveyard Shift," a short story from the collection Night Shift, and from there I was hooked for some time. Even today, this remains my favorite King work. It is his short stories that I find the most satisfying, and I often feel that many of his novels should have been short stories (9/10ths of the way through the hard-cover edition of It, I slammed the book closed, hurled It across the room, and screamed, "I don't CARE what happens!"). Of course, I also feel that most of his short stories should NEVER have been made into movies (four from this book alone!), but that's another long story! In this collection, you can find the two stories that were the basis for Salem's Lot, as well as some great pieces that inspired some of his worst big-screen debacles, such as Maximum Overdrive and The Mangler.

Gavin J. Grant
A Is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age
by Barry Sanders
Here's one for bibliophiles, although Sanders isn't writing about the love of books; he's worried about literacy, and how we define it. If I instant-message my friends all day, am I literate? How about if I download Moby Dick onto my Palm Pilot? Sanders wonders whether without the physical book, will readers believe in the authority of the author? When they're using computers, who do they trust more, themselves or the computer? Written in the mid-1990s, A Is for Ox is a historical snapshot of attitudes toward on-screen text. Sanders is (perhaps justifiably) worried that images are taking over from words and that present and future generations will lose the deep cultural links to one another and to the past if they lose the ability (and urge) to read. A Is for Ox ranges from wonderings about video-game violence to where the alphabet originated (a is for aleph is for ox!). It's never less than interesting, occasionally controversial, and bound to annoy your Internet-savvy friends.

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