The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists by Gideon DeFoe

It's fun, it's fast, and it's destined to be a classic, or at least a Terry Gilliam movie.

The best way to describe the style of The Pirates! book is to say that...well... imagine a ten year old bookworm who loved pirates very much got drunk and then tried to tell an adventure story involving pirates and Charles Darwin. Yeah, that pretty much captures it. The crew of the ship, along with the ship itself, tend not to have names so much as descriptions. The captain's name is The Pirate Captain. His loyal crew includes The Pirate with an Accordion, The Pirate with a Scarf, and The Pirate who was prone to exaggeration. This crew manages to get into a misadventure involving Charles Darwin and his quest to breed a Man-panzee, which is basically a chimp with very good manners, fashion sense, and the ability to communicate using flashcards. The pirates love ham, and love to debate the best ways to prepare ham. They've had adventures with cowboys. There are swordfights, battles involving the periodic table of elements, the Elephant Man, scurvy, and a tag-team wrestling match involving the Holy Ghost and monkeys!

DeFoe's humor seems to be, amazingly, based on meticulous research. For every mention of disco, Elvis, or... well, Charles Darwin, there are footnotes, facts, and data that seem to shape and support humor in the book. Here's to the next adventure with the Pirates! May their next voyage be as farcical as the last.

Go To Hell by Chuck Crisafulli and Kyra Thompson

A fun little walking tour of the many Hells that have been on Earth. It's sort of a condensed, Reader's Digest, brush-over of different Hells through history, cultures, and societies. The authors discuss the many permutations and philosophies of different religions and their views of hell, while throwing in interesting tidbits on hell-related towns and movies. All in all, I was expecting something a little more detailed. Perhaps a full chapter on each of the Hells of the dead societies, with bios of their gods, demigods, etc.

The Truth (with Jokes) by Al Franken

There's truth in all good comedy, but at what point does the truth begin to hurt so much that the jokes lose their humor and become horrifying mirrors of society? And should any book review begin with such a bleeding heart, philosophy major type of opening? The answer to both questions is, "maybe".

Franken's latest book uncovers some truly inexcusable misdeeds from the friends of those currently in power, from Tom Delay to Jack "Saipan Slave Labor - Made in the USA!" Abramoff. While there is the expected amount of Bush-bashing (and surprisingly few shots at Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Coulter, there is a soberness to the book that was a bit unexpected. Franken wrote his last book (Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) as a sort of prelude to regime change. His dreams didn't come true, the in "The Truth", there's a bit of an exasperated "what the Hell is it going to take to get through to you people?" feel.

Franken expressly promises exactly two jokes in the book, although a close reading my provide more. Franken gives his views on diverse topics like Republican "morality" ("From what I understand, if you cut out all the passages in the Bible where Jesus talks about the poor, about helping out the least among us, you'd have the perfect container to smuggle Rush Limbaugh's drugs in") to Bush's social security "crisis" (The number Bush kept using, $11 trillion, represented the total shortfall from now until the year Infinity. If you think about it, $11 trillion over infinity years is nothing. Over the first 11 trillion years, that's just one dollar a year. Easy. After that, it's over. You're done. What, exactly, is the problem?".

He has a gift for defusing the most bull-headed of right-wing arguments. His true gift comes in his view of the issues: people, he argues, are for the most part good. We all want the same things: happiness, more money, security, a clean environment and a hopeful future. Franken isn't afraid to admit that there are Republicans out there with hearts (he even names three or four! See? Detail-oriented! Painstaking research!), and for the majority of his book, he tries to reach those that have forgotten how to use theirs.

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Some ground rules: don't look for punctuation. Don't look for meticulously crafted passages. Forget about linear narratives. And most of all, keep your hands inside the car until the ride has come to a complete stop.

Everything is Illuminated is an amazingly complex, clumsy, adorable, frustrating, and most of all moving work of literature. Foer has created a narrative moving in two directions at once. Alexander (Sasha) the co-narrator of the book, discusses present events in a hilariously butchered (and unintentionally deep) English-by-way-of-Ukraine dialect. Foer himself is the other narrator, digging up the past for a winding history of his family. Ultimately, he has traveled to the Ukraine to find the woman who rescued his grandfather from the Nazis. Foer is trying to break free from his past, and Alexander is trying to break free from his future. Barring a miracle, he'll be stuck in the same horrible travel guide job that has sustained his father and grandfather before him.

Foer rockets between the past and the present, from the fantastical formation of a tiny shtetl in Eastern Europe to the birth of his great great etc relatives, to the present, where Alex reviews history as Foer writes it and offers suggestions for improvement. While Alex slowly comes to grips with the fact that any truly human story is inherently unhappy, Foer comes to realize that the world is not as dark a place as he'd like it to be.

Some of the best humor in the book comes from the clash of cultures. There's American pop culture as Alex's second language ("For an example, I exhibited him a smutty magazine three days yore, so that he should be appraised of the many positions in which I am carnal.") or American culture as the object of ridicule (see the vegan discussion in the chapter "Going Forth to Lutsk").

Foer grinds gears from the comic to the maudlin to the harrowing ("What We Saw When We Saw Trachimbrod") with reckless abandon. It can be difficult to keep up with him, but in the end, you'll be happy you took the ride. All of the stories loose ends are tied up nicely at the end, and indeed, everything is illuminated, whether it's shedding light on a mystery or revealing those aspects of humanity we'd rather ignore.

Different Seasons by Stephen King

Four "normal" stories from the master of terror. Different Seasons could well be subtitled "The Movie Book". Of the four stories contained, three (The Body, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, and Apt Pupil) have been translated into fantastic movies. The fourth story - The Breathing Method would also work well in the hands of the right director.

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption - Andy Dufresne is serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife. He claims innocence - a fact that Red, the prison's man-in-the-know, believes. Red chronicles Andy's stay at Shawshank, and his unlikely exit. The story is not a prison break caper, but focuses more on the emotional and spiritual impact life in prison can have on a man.

Apt Pupil - Todd Bowden, the All-American boy, has been stalking an old man in his neighborhood. The man, Kurt Dussander, is a Nazi war criminal in hiding. Todd begins a cruel game, blackmailing Dussander for information about his past misdeeds. Dussander responds in kind, locking Todd into a relationship of mutual paranoia and destruction. This is a tale of two monsters, one coming into being, and one at the end of his days.

The Body - Four kids go off on an adventure to see a dead body by the railroad tracks. What follows is a Northern Woods Tolkeinesque journey of discovery, where the boys become as close as they'll ever be. Lives are changed forever, not by the goal, but of course, by the walk.

The Breathing Method - David joins an old-fashioned men's club, of sorts. It's room after room of comfortable leather chairs, roaring fireplaces, polished wood, fine liquor, and billiards. But on certain nights, it becomes something else, a cavernous labyrinth too big to be contained in the building where it stands. Some nights, men are selected to tell stories, confessionals, to feed the beast the lurks somewhere inside. Guests are welcome to come by unannounced at any time. At the end of the night, the lucky ones get to return home.

King weaves these tales together as a sort of life cycle. Andy Dufresne is reborn into the world, Todd Bowden moves out of childhood into a dark adolescence. The boys in The Body become men on their journeys. And David, the narrator of The Breathing Method faces the end of his days along with the other old codgers of the club.

Like most of King's work, the pacing is quick, the creep factor is high, but the reward is well worth the journey.

The Coma by Alex Garland

Easy, breezy, weird... who would have thought being beaten into a coma would make such a fun read? In terms of quirky short books I've picked up, The Coma rivals Lydia Millet's My Happy Life. Garland, famous for his novel The Beach and screenplay 28 Days Later, weaves a philosophical web that leads the readers into (or out of) the real world and into (or out of) the perceived world. The narrator, a pleasant enough fellow, is beaten into a coma on a Tube ride home from the office after he briefly and minimally interferes with some thugs who are menacing a female rider.

He wakes on a rollercoaster ride through his psyche. Not quite a nightmare, not quite a dream, his life takes on new meaning as he can only wander from one memory to the next. He has some control over his world, but things are happening inside his mind without conscious thought. He can't remember the words to Little Richard tunes, but without even trying, he sees intricate details: blades of grass, the weave of the cotton in his shirt, the shapes of clouds in the sky.

He rides out the coma through highs and lows, briefly surfacing in the real world before sinking down again into darkness. The narrator struggles to find the key to his release, buried somewhere in his memory.

The Coma is quick, but by no means is it light reading. There's a lot happening on these pages, and the resolution leaves you plenty to think about and a fresh perspective on the world. If you're lucky enough to find yourself dreaming after reading this book, try to discover if the act of sleeping is really the first step in waking up...