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"In Bed" with James Patterson

Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais
"Elvis Cole is back and he isn't missing a beat. I don't know how many Elvis Cole detective thrillers there have been at this point, but he's one I'm definitely glad has stuck around."

Fidelity by Thomas Perry
"If you like your thrillers smart, twisty, and full of human drama, Thomas Perry novels are a good place to spend some time. I'd recommend getting this one in hardcover because you'll grip it so hard, a paperback edition will get disfigured."

The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll
"This is an authoritative, compelling, surprising, and often terrifying look at the family that raised and now lives in the shadow of America's most famous enemy. It's not exactly an airy read, but the stunning facts woven together by this Pulitzer-winning author managed to keep the pages turning for me."

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku
"Michio Kaku has established himself as one of the few people in the world who can take the 'un' out of the unintelligible world of cutting-edge science. This one's about things from the world of science fiction that you might think impossible...but aren't."

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
"This one's Jack Patterson tested and James Patterson approved. I'm starting a program for parents and educators called ReadKiddoRead.com very shortly. It'll be a site where a librarian pal of mine and I pinpoint the books that can get your kids hooked on reading. This Wimpy Kid is going to be at the top of the heap."

First Reads — win prerelease books from Goodreads!

Be the first to read new books! Goodreads has tons of prerelease books and reading-themed goodies available for our members. All you have to do is sign up and cross your fingers! View all prerelease books on First Reads »

This month, we're giving away five Sony eReaders, each loaded with James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series, plus a hardcover of his new book, The Dangerous Days of Daniel X. Sign up to win a Patterson eReader! »

Movers & shakers

Goodreads can tell you what's hot! These books have been racing up our most popular charts in the last month.

Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World by David Maraniss
Read up on the history of the world's oldest competition just in time for Beijing's opening ceremonies. In 1960, 84 nations gathered under the shadow of the Cold War to compete in Rome: Abebe Bikila won the marathon running barefoot, Wilma Rudolph overcame polio to sprint her way to three gold medals, and the world met teenage legend-in-the-making Muhammad Ali. Pulitzer Prize winner Maraniss will be answering questions on Goodreads beginning August 4th.
Join the Q&A discussion group »

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
A mysterious Westerner travels east to the court of Mughal Emperor Akbar to tell the epic story of an enchantress. But when the stranger claims to be of royal blood, the emperor must determine where the story stops and reality begins. Goodreads member Meri says, "The plot is only the novel's skeleton, and the story weaves myth, history, and philosophy together to open dialogue on the mingling of Eastern and Western culture. The story is simply beautiful, though there's nothing simple about it."

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
The Fight Club author takes on another uncomfortable subject in his new novel about a porn film in the making. Goodreads member Jeff says, "Snuff is pure Palahniuk through-and-through — the story and the characters are grotesque, brutal, cringe-worthy, and somehow, incredibly human and oddly sympathetic." And ShellBell sums it up, "Snuff felt like a picture window into a dirty, dirty scene. I kept pressing my face up against the glass to get a better view."

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
When womanizing architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the very married Mamah Borthwick Cheney absconded to Europe to live out their love affair, Victorian society cringed. Goodreads member Katherine says, "This book is so much more than a story about an illicit love affair and the scandal it caused...Nancy Horan gives voice to a woman that few know about and puts her in context in an era when women couldn't vote, work and be self-sufficient."

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
A mute teenager must avenge his father's death with the help of his trusty dogs. It's Hamlet reengineered in rural Wisconsin. Goodreads member Joey says, "Edgar Sawtelle is an unforgettable character, like Huck Finn, Ignatius O'Reilly, or Holly Golightly. He'll be an old friend for the rest of my life." And Anne adds, "My husband arrived as I had 100 pages left, and I could barely greet and then feed him before I dove back into the story."

The Never-Ending Book Quiz

Think you have a mind like a steel trap? Play the The Never-Ending Book Quiz and see how you stack up against your friends!

New feature: place your votes on Listopia!

Forget the New York Times bestseller list, Goodreads has created a way for readers to reveal what's really on their minds. And everyone can vote, so you know that these lists are entirely people-powered. Members have already started duking it out over the Best Books of the 20th Century. Who do you think should have top honors? Harper Lee? J.D. Salinger? Give your favorite author a boost by voting!

Don't stop there — check out other member-generated lists: Best Young Adult Novels, Best Utopia, Dystopia, and Other World Fiction, the controversial Worst Books of All Time, or start your own! You can also vote every month for the best new books — vote now for the Best Books of July 2008!

10 Questions for Christina Schwarz — Goodreads Exclusive

A sister drowns mysteriously in the frigid waters of a Wisconsin lake, a writer deceives her best friend to fuel her naked ambition, a guilt-ridden husband leads a secret life with his mistress — these are all main characters from Christina Schwarz's novels. In 2000, Schwarz rocketed to national attention when Oprah selected her debut novel, Drowning Ruth, for her Book Club. Now the Yale grad has a new book, So Long at the Fair. She shares some of her tools of the trade with Goodreads.

Do you have more questions for Christina Schwarz? Starting today, she is available to answer all your questions and talk about her new book — Join the Q&A discussion group! »

Goodreads: Your new book, So Long at the Fair, is written from multiple perspectives. The reader gets inside the heads of wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, and even a mistress and a stalker. What is it about using multiple perspectives that fascinates you?

Christina Schwarz: Generally, I'm interested in the idea that reality is subjective, that each person observes a single event in a different way. That, in itself, is a story to me. Multiple perspectives were ideal for this novel because I was trying to present a situation in which people couldn't possibly see eye to eye — adultery — but I wanted my audience to be sympathetic to all parties. The only way to do that was to show readers the affair from the point of view of each of the three people involved.

GR: Your first two books, Drowning Ruth and All Is Vanity, focused much more on female perspectives and the world of women. In contrast, So Long at the Fair has several male characters, and the story hangs on Jon's inability to choose between his wife and his mistress. How is creating a male character different from creating a female character?

CS: For me, it was much harder. I think men's experience of the world is in some instances different from women's. While a woman may have been equally angry at the honking man in the SUV, for instance, she would have been less likely to challenge the driver. It's natural for me to think of how a woman might react in certain circumstances, but I have to consider more carefully and deliberately when I'm deciding what a man might do. And then, too, I lacked confidence in my choices, at least until Jon was well-established. Often, I checked with my husband to see if Jon was thinking and acting in ways that were believable from a man's point of view.

GR: Both Drowning Ruth and So Long at the Fair are set in Wisconsin and have a distinctly Midwestern sense of place. Although you grew up in Wisconsin, you've since lived in several more urban places, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston. Why does your hometown inspire you?

CS: I use Wisconsin in my fiction partly because it's in my blood. Southeastern Wisconsin is a place I know intimately and yet have enough distance from to "romanticize" readily. Because it's so steeped in my mind with personal memory and with the stories of my grandmother, my great aunt, and my father, it's just full of atmosphere for me.

Read the next seven questions »

10 Questions for Rob Walker — Goodreads Exclusive

Do you feel gleeful when you fast-forward through commercials on your TiVo? Those ads can be skipped over, but we are surrounded more and more by sneaky forms of advertising that cannot be ignored. Consumer culture expert and New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker examines our incestuous relationship with the stuff we buy in his new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. Walker reveals some idiosyncrasies of consumer culture and tells Goodreads why he's in mourning for his Chuck Taylor sneakers.

Want to know what your buying habits say about you? Walker will be available in August to answer all your questions and talk about his new book — Join the Q&A discussion group! »

Goodreads: Many people like to think that they are immune to advertising, or at least smart enough to think for themselves. In your new book, Buying In, you've discovered that we embrace brands and use our choices as a form of self-expression. Does this mean that consumers hold the power, or are we still the pawns of smart marketing campaigns?

Rob Walker: In the book I admit that I certainly counted myself among those who figured I was brandproof. After all, I'm a journalist who writes about this stuff for a living, so if anybody can "see through" it, it's me. Then Nike bought Converse. I've always been sort of anti-swoosh as a consumer. So I'd always worn Converse. Obviously there was never, ever a moment when I got up and said, "Ah, I must go buy a pair of Converse sneakers so as to reflect my identity" or "because my maverick indie-rock heroes wear them" or whatever. And I certainly don't remember ever seeing an ad for the brand. But when Nike bought it, I realized I was having a kind of crisis about whether I could l keep wearing Chuck Taylors. So despite my protestations, I was clearly as susceptible to some notion of brand meaning.

The real point is that branding is not simply a one-way process — this is why I use the word "dialogue" in the subtitle. No brand ever catches on in the marketplace without consumers embracing it. And on some level, defining it. Sometimes that lines up with what the brand owner had in mind, and sometimes it doesn't. In the book I talk about how consumers redefined Timberland, and how consumers basically invented a whole new meaning for Pabst Blue Ribbon (as a sort of anti-brand brand) that initially baffled the company itself.

So I wouldn't say that we're pawns. To the contrary, I would actually say we have a lot of power. I'm just not always sure we're deploying that power in the ways we really want to — and that's why I wrote the book. I hope that understanding the process (both the marketing process and the mental process of consumption) will help people make better decisions. But the first step is recognizing that just saying, "it doesn't affect me," is not a great starting point.

GR: Tell us about the term you coined, "murketing."

RW: Most observers of what's changed in consumer culture in the 21st century point to things like TiVo and say, "Ah ha, this really empowers consumers, they can zap past ads — bad news for ad agencies." But of course marketers didn't just call up their clients and say, "Well, it's all over, we can't help you anymore." In a weird way, TiVo actually empowered marketers — it forced them to think about ways of branding that escaped the confines of a traditional ad. (And it made big, mainstream clients much more willing to sign off on, and underwrite, such tactics.)

So now we have things like Unilever's Axe brand creating a show for MTV, and huge word-of-mouth marketing agencies that enlist hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to "spread buzz" about products at the family picnic or whatever, and we have Toyota throwing underground parties with the coolest DJs on behalf of its Scion brand, and Red Bull underwriting insane stunts like a kite-boarding trip from Key West to Cuba, and so on. And what these tactics have done is made the line between marketing and everyday life more and more murky. Hence murketing.

GR: You wrote recently in your New York Times Magazine Consumed column that Barack Obama supporters' surprising amount of creative output (posters, music videos, T-shirt designs, etc.) is spurred by Obama's success as an appealing brand. Political campaigns must compete for our attention, so they use many of the techniques honed by marketers. How do you compare the two "brands" developed by Obama and John McCain?

RW: In Salon recently, Laura Miller wrote an interesting column about Obama in which she actually mentioned Buying In and a concept I discuss there, "projectability." This is related to all of the above, and it's basically about letting consumers fill in the blanks about what a brand "means." So in the case of Red Bull, for instance, there was never really a very clear marketing message about its functionality or who it was for. The murketing of Red Bull really worked, in the sense that in less than a decade it went from being obscure to being a brand you might see at a gym, a night club, a college campus, an office, a grocery store — and it somehow makes sense everywhere. That's pretty unusual. And it's precisely because of "projectability."

So Miller suggests maybe Obama has something similar — in that everyone seems to in effect project onto him these idealized meanings. If she's right, that's actually a little more dangerous for a political candidate than for an energy drink. At some point a candidate is likely to be pressed to clarify some things.

On the other hand, I do think we're in new territory with this campaign, for a bunch of reasons, including media-fragmentation reasons. I obviously have no idea how it will play out.

As for McCain, his message seems to be sort of classical/traditional, he's sort of the familiar guy you trust. I don't know how well that's really working for him. But of course the campaign still — incredibly enough, given that it seems to have lasted forever already — has a long way to go.

Read the next seven questions »

Poem of the month

Beginner's Lessons by Malcolm Alexander

If you wish to be wealthy, duck beneath
the topcoat of a well-dressed river
until you come up with a mossy boot
filled with shiners. Spend them wisely.

To tread lightly on the earth,
first breathe in and out slowly
to sense how oxygen walks barefoot,
then observe butterflies, so weightless
even our poetry burdens them.

Avoid mistaking sadness for blueberries,
but if this happens remember only one
of the two tastes like a somersault.

Make nothing more of the moon
than what it is, a great big pebble
hunting for a shoe, not to be confused
with the heart, likewise a vagabond.

Inside of every stray cat lurks a person
who discarded love. Remember this
when you bend over to wind them up.

If you feel compelled to fly a flag,
note how it struggles in vain to be a rainbow
and how envy will make it twist and flap
like a tongue. Consider instead a kite.

If you desire to reach heaven,
have your body buried in an aspen grove.
In time, all of you will wick up
into a loud version of it.

If the din of the human world overwhelms you,
trace the voicebox of an orchid with your finger.
When you get to the aria, listen.
But beware, for beauty can be a lacewing
or a meteor, and lands wherever it pleases.

When you finish reading a poem,
bend it around so you can see
yourself in it. Then laugh out loud.
Everything else now should come easy.

Read more poetry »

With love,

Jessica, Elizabeth and the Goodreads Team

ps. Goodreads is hiring developers!