Posts by Kevin Nguyen
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June Book Recommendations: Young Adult for Adults
If the record-breaking ticket presales of The Fault in Our Stars is any indication, young adult fiction is having a bit of a moment. And though plenty of books in the genre have grossed well at the box office, they’ve been exclusively fantasy/sci-fi series. Young adult books tell some of the best stories about identity. […]
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May Book Recommendations: Eight Women on the Verge of a Breakthrough Novel
Does the work of Edith Wharton really need more advocates? If there are women who deserve our literary attention, it’s the talented young novelists whose books are on the cusp of breaking into the mainstream.
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April Book Recommendations: Farm to Table to Family to Kitchen
For anyone who has ever dreamed of being a chef, ‘Sous Chef’ is an escapist fantasy. Michael Gibney has compiled his years of experience as the second-in-command of a three-star restaurant in New York, playfully mashing up memoir and fiction. ‘A Farm Dies Once a Year’ by Arlo Crawford, meanwhile, is a meditation on the patience and will it takes to live off the land.
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March Book Recommendations: Big Data, Good Data, Bad Data
Exploring ‘The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?’ and ‘Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.’
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February Book Recommendations: Man vs. Science Fiction
Both ‘Annihilation’ and ‘The Martian’ operate knowingly outside of traditional science fiction, bending genres and having a lot of fun while doing it.
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January Book Recommendations
Wiley Cash’s debut novel This Dark Road to Mercy, Nicholas Griffin’s Ping Pong Diplomacy, and Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy.
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Overlooked Books of 2013: A History of the Future in 100 Objects, Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, and Bellies and Buffalos
A History of the Future in 100 Objects, by Adrian Hon Riffing on Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, which took everyday items and described human history through them, Adrian Hon has imagined the next century through future technologies. In the next 10 years, Hon sees an algae-based replacement for petroleum, […]
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November Book Recommendations: Monsters, The Isle of Youth, Anything That Moves
Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football by Rich Cohen I’m often asked why I don’t recommend sports books. I actually read quite a few of them; it’s just rare I find one I like. Generally speaking, a lot of sports books are too obsessive — letting nerdy details get in […]
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October Book Recommendations: The Circle, The Night Guest, and Thank You for Your Service
The Circle, by Dave Eggers At the airport the other week, I met someone wearing Google Glass. Or more accurately, he introduced himself so he could tell me all about his tech-y eyewear. He was a well-meaning (though somewhat smug) software developer, and I nodded politely as he detailed all of Glass’s features: It could take […]
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September Book Recommendations: A Beautiful Truth, Floating City, and The Maid's Version
A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam I recently watched a great documentary called Project Nim, about an Upper West Side family of academic hippies who adopt a chimpanzee in the early ’70s. Their goal is to condition the young ape to communicate with humans by raising him as a normal human child. The controversial experiment […]
