This year's John Swartzwelder novel is The Exploding Detective, which is a Frank Burly story dealing with supervillainy, time travel, and jetpacks. If you've read any of his other novels, and especially The Time Machine Did It or How I Conquered Your Planet, then that's all you need to know. If not, I will explain a little.

John Swartzwelder is, as the cover of his books say, the author of 59 Simpsons episodes. He stopped writing for the Simpsons in 2004 and started writing these books (though he was back to write on the movie). I'm sure most people will find their way to these books from the high praise they get on the commentary tracks to the latest few Simpsons DVDs, as I did.

There is a piece of the commentary for season 10 where the staff says that John Swartzwelder can get them to keep anything in the script, no matter how ridiculous, by prefixing it with "for some reason" (a gunfight breaks out between the cowboys, for some reason, one starts digging a hole). I'd say something like 1/5th of the humor in these books comes from something similar–a little tag at the end of an otherwise cliché sentence.

Anyway, the books are short and not too expensive, so I'd say start with The Time Machine Did It and work your way up. He's writing about 1 a year, if you include the non Frank Burly Double Wonderful.

Harry Potter is a series of books about teenage wizards fighting against a twisted dark wizard named Voldemort. You might want to consider not saying his name. It's fucking cursed. In book 1, Harry learns all about wizard school and the crazy wizard lacrosse game, Quidditch. Quidditch matches are to Harry Potter as hunting parties are to the novels of Anthony Trollope: expect that you will have to read about a match every 200 pages. (An aside here, Quidditch is scored like Family Feud–you can play the first two rounds, but the third round all alone is worth 300 points and basically determines the outcome of the game. Similarly, the team that "catches the golden snitch" almost always wins.) He also saves an artifact called the Sorceror's Stone from falling into the hands of the bad guy. Some dude has two faces and it sucks.

In book 2, Harry discovers a secret room in the castle, and is attacked by a lizard. There is also a talking book. It reminded me of Stevie Wonder's seminal 1972 album, Talking Book. He saves a little girl.

Book 3 is a family story, with Harry learning lots about his parents and his Godfather. He also does a lot of sneaking around and gets a magical map. The book is also about racism. Get used to that, too.

In Book 4, Harry is entered in the junior wizard olympics, fighting dragons and swimming underwater and going through a hedge maze. At the end it turns out that the bad guy (I said his name at the top) is back, which eats shit. Also, Harry has his first crush on a girl, and starts growing hair in places.

Book 5 is about a super secret club called the Order of the Phoenix, dedicated to fighting the bad guy wherever he goes. It is also about exams. Exams in England don't make much sense, and wizard exams don't actually seem any stranger than secular exams. I will spoil it for you now: Harry ends up doing pretty well, but not as well as his know-it-all friend Hermione.

In Book 6, Harry gets some help with his schoolwork from an old book. It's kinda cheating, but he thinks maybe the book belonged to his dad (it didn't), and I thought maybe it had belonged to his mom (it didn't), and it isn't until the very end that it turns out that it belonged to bad guy #2. Also, Harry's wizard mentor is killed, and leaves Harry with a daunting task that leads directly to book 7…

In which Harry goes looking for about 10 different magical items that he needs to either possess or destroy in order to win the fight against the main bad dude. His friends fight and they spend a lot of time camping, and then there is a big battle at the end and a lot of complicated stuff about magic wands. You could replace most of the second-to-last chapter with a discussion about the merits of turbochargers as opposed to the merits of superchargers if you want, Harry is going to recap all of the wand stuff in a dramatic monologue at the end anyway. Oh, and it turns out bad guy #2, well, I don't want to spoil it.

I got to Harry Potter by a circuitous route, after reading Can You Forgive Her, Phineas Finn, everything by Haruki Murakami, The House of Mirth, and The Satanic Verses. One day I had an extra 5 minutes, and I started reading a wikipedia article about magic wands in Harry Potter. I was warned that the books weren't really about magic wands, but still I embarked on the journey.

Although I wrote the review as if you hadn't read it, I don't feel the need to offer a recommendation. Either you will read it or you won't. You know which you are.

The House of Mirth, like many Victorian novels, is about marrying well. Stay with me, here, because there are two differences between this and the reviews of several English novels I've read in the last two years. In the first place, it isn't English. It's a story of old New York, turn of the century. Of course, it is about the upper class, and they spend a great deal of time in Europe, but it is not English. Second and more importantly, it does not have a happy ending. Not even a happy ending for the main character tempered by, say, an unhappy marriage for her best friend. It is not Can You Forgive Her.

Lily Bart is a stunning beauty and an accomplished flirt, but, for whatever reason, keeps ruining her prospects for a good marriage. She's self destructive. She is also poor, and running with a wealthy crowd which exhausts her resources and puts her in debt. She has a number of unsavory business associations, which hurt her social prospects, and she finds her name connected, in rumor, to two different married men.

There are sympathetic characters in the story, like Gertie Farrish, but they are few and far between. Almost everyone in the book is unlikeable, including, for the most part, Lily. Still, by the end, I had come around to hoping things would go well with her, and I was a little disappointed when they did not, but I suppose that's part of what makes the novel fresh.