The Sentence by Louise Erdrich The logline got me to put this book on my wishlist: bookseller is haunted by a ghost. I expected maybe something cute and a little bit spooky, like a cozy mystery with supernatural elements. But this book is much deeper than that. I hadn’t realized it dealt so much with …

The Fisherman by John Langan I wanted a book that scratched the same itch as T. Kingfisher’s horror, and this one did the trick. It’s very firmly ensconced in the real world, and yet the supernatural elements seemed plausible. One of the ways in which Langan brings the reader into the supernatural elements is through …

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski I’d heard about this book for years as being a unique book that was dark and trippy. It’s been compared to Lovecraft, which is the name people always dredge up when they want to say “horror, but literary.” The only thing I knew about the plot was that …

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter If you’ve ever wondered why English doesn’t act like other Germanic languages, this book is for you. It’s more than just “here’s all the stuff we stole from the Norman French” but goes into why we say “do you have the time” instead …