Hello friends!

It is the last full week of January. Yay! We made it through one month! The next one will be—okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's circle back around and stick with the mass market extravanga-polooza that is the dog-end of the first days. 

But first, here's a pirate!
 

This is Balbuzar. He has a giant beard that can hide an entire wheel of cheese. He is a friend to birds. He lives in harmony with the sea. He plunders as he pleases. This, of course, annoys the Empress Pétia XIII, who sends her best commander and an enormous fleet to deal with Balbuzar. How enormous of a fleet? 

Exceptionally enormous, and it is all delightfully detailed by Frédéric Pillot, who has the exciting task of illustrating Gérard Moncomble's fabulist tale. Balbuzar is a bit long to be a kid's picture book, and there aren't quite enough word bubbles for it to be a graphic novel, but oh gosh goodness golly! it is a pretty book, filled with so many pretty illustrations. We like this one a lot. 
 

We feel like we should take note of Johann Hari's Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How To Think Deeply Again, but, well, two things: 1) Hari notes that, statistically speaking, students switch tasks every sixty-five seconds; and 2) Are we sure that subtitle needs an em-dash? Also, 3) James Patterson has a book out this week. 

It turns out that it's not you, it's everyone and everything. It's all conspiring to suck your attention, which is definitely a reason to visit the bookstore and get something to read. 
 

And speaking of book covers that are blue and red, here is Wajahat Ali's Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American. (We're going to gloss over that colon. These are the trials we must bear in this age of multi-field keyword cramming.) Throughout his life, and especially after 9/11, American-born Ali has been confronted with this helpful suggestion, and he has found that his honest response is rarely met with compassion and understanding. ("What, go back to the Bay Area, where the rents are unaffordable?") Ali, a New York Times contributing writer, has crafted a moving memoir about the experience of being Pakistani-American. 
 

In the bookstore, we are constantly watching for subtle shifts in the publishing industry, and this week, well, this week sees the release of J. D. Robb's Naked in Death in trade paperback. We know. We know. Fifty books in, and Berkley is finally putting the series out in trade. Sure, they've slapped a discounted price on the first one ($12), but that's still two dollars more than the mass market price. Two dollars! 

(We'll pause for the six of you who remember that John Cusack film to do the bit. Wait for it. Wait for it. Okay, go!)

Anyway. J.D. Robb is now in trade. It's all over, gang. Publishing will never be the same. We're going to have to reset all the shelves in the store. Great. A new project. 

Well, we might as well celebrate the pocket-sized paperback form while we can. 
 

First up is Linda Reilly's Up to No Gouda, which, frankly, makes us laugh every time we see it. It's a mystery! It has grilled cheese sandwiches! It has a dead guy in the alley! It has all sorts of suspects! And sleepy town charm! Our charming protagonist must solve the murder before she is . . . wait for it . . . put under "lock and brie." 

It's almost a mic drop moment, really. Where do you go from there? 
 

Well, to naked highlanders emerging out of a hot water spring, of course. Lyndsay Sands delivers Highland Wolf, the tenth volume in her sexy historical romance series. In this one, Lady Claray MacFarlane was to be wed to some ass-hat from the next county, but oh no! she was snatched away from a certainly dreadful marriage at the last minute by a mysterious highland mercenary nicknamed the "Wolf," who is as handsome as he is naked (well, on the cover, at least). Who is this dreadful menace? Oh, he's . . . uh . . . a displaced nobleman who has been in hiding since forever, and who was originally betrothed to Claray, but what with the faked death and the loss of his heritage, he couldn't do the honorable thing, and so he did the second-best thing which was to abduct her . . . ?  

Anyway, we hope they get this all sorted out by the end of the book. 
 

Meanwhile, here is Cathy Maxwell's His Lessons in Love, which is about a clueless dude who has to figure out how to navigate some aspect of life that he knows nothing about while being utterly oblivious to the hot lady who keeps hanging around to deal with whatever the heck it is that he has mucked up. It's part of a series titled The Logical Man's Guide to Dangerous Women, which we guess is a six-page pamphlet that spends most of its time warning men that no matter what they say, they'll be wrong. 

Again, we hope these two sort out their issues by the end of the book. 
 

And here is Christine Feehan's Savage Road, which looks like a direct-to-DVD rental that the studio hopes you think is a film that Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson doesn't want to you know he did. It's got steamy eye contact! Swirly swirling bits! A motorcycle club with a name that sounds like someone was playing Mad Libs when they were filling out the incorporation papers.

"I need some kind of . . . uh . . . military armament and something black." "How about 'Torpedo' and 'Ink'?" "Perfect." 

And while we're on the topic of subtle shifts in the publishing industry, this cover is a bit . . . different. The dude is looking at us, but so is the girl. Romance covers don't tend to break the fourth wall like this. Hmmm. Maybe there's something extra spicy in this one!
 

Oh, and that Patterson book we mentioned earlier when neither of us was paying attention? The Palm Beach Murders. It's actually a reissue of Let's Play Make-Believe, along with a pair of ebook-only releases, and so, it counts for the Not At All Official James Patterson 2022 Checklist, but barely. If you haven't read it or have forgotten what it was about, you can certainly check it off. We won't side-eye ya. 
 

Right. Well, here's an actual original title. This is Chad Orzel's A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks. Orzel—a physicist, professor, and blogger—has a knack for making science talk less soporific (he even has a book where he claims he can teach quantum physics to your dog!), and in A Brief History of Timekeeping, he traces the evolution of the answer to that eternal question: "What time is it?" 

Time is, of course, something we don't know how to manage very well (see Hari above), but it's also something we don't know all that much about. Orzel takes us on a delightfully sardonic and entertaining tour of this intricate and engaging corner of scientific thinking. 
 

And that brings us back to what we were talking about earlier, which is John Darnielle's Devil House. Darnielle, who moonlights as the singer for some band called The Mountain Goats, takes us on a darkly metafictional story about a true crime writer who has been living in a house where a couple of gruesome murders took place. Concurrent with this, we get excerpts from the writer's previous book, which is about a teacher who killed a couple of students in self-defense after they broke into the teacher's apartment. Also, there's a bit about Arthurian legends, and a bit of a critique about the narrative form—which form? we're not sure; it's gotten a little confusing in here—and ultimately, Devil House is, like Danielewski's House of Leaves: bigger on the inside. It's a marvelously creepy story that will appeal to true crime fans and horror readers alike. 

We've gotten you all turned around now, haven't we? Probably don't even remember where you live now. It's okay. You can always come to the bookstore.