Reading

The Blue Angel Motel sits at the bottom of Fremont Street in a neon graveyard where the signs still advertise “Color TV,” the swimming pools are filled with gravel, and the rent money is earned at the blood bank. No valets or bellmen or doormen here. Just madmen (and madwomen). It’s a two-story motel … with a million stories.

When does clutter turn into a compulsive hoarding disorder? In Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), pioneering hoarding researchers Randy Frost and Gail Steketee describe various manifestations of what is now recognized as a mental disorder that afflicts six million Americans.

Scott Pilgrim is the quintessential indie slacker: occasionally employed, bumming off others, obsessed with video games and comics, but basically a good guy. He’s living with his friend, not doing much with his life, when he meets the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers. She’s got dyed hair, aviator goggles and the ability to travel the subspace highways through Scott’s brain. But if Scott wants to date her, he must first defeat her Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends. This battle for true love is complicated by Scott’s own exes, ambitious bandmates and Knives Chau, Scott’s clingy high school sorta-girlfriend—but mostly by Scott himself.

When the Darwin Centre’s prize exhibit, an eight-meter giant squid, goes missing, biologist Billy Harrow is drawn into an other-London of battling cults and competing Armageddonim. In Kraken (Del Ray, 2010), the world is hurtling to some kind of apocalypse—but which one?

China Miéville is a Dungeons & Dragons super-nerd, but with an Oxford and Harvard education and a failed run for Parliament. Miéville combines that impressive background with a love of pulp horror and its monsters.