Picture yourself at the matinee on a Saturday, there’s a steady rain outside, and the temperature has just taken a nosedive into the fifties.  The popcorn is fresh and you’re getting ready to watch a very cool sci-fi movie that has a little meaning to it (enough to justify telling others that you actually saw the movie!).  That’s a great feeling isn’t it?   Well, grab a big bowl of popcorn and curl up with Matt Ruff’s new book, Bad Monkeys (13.95).  Think Phillip K. Dick meets the Matrix and a little bit of Pulp Fiction.  The book opens in the psychiatric ward of a prison where our narrator Jane Charlotte is in handcuffs and telling her story of being in an elite agency that rids the world of “bad monkeys”…kind of an underground justice society.  As her story unfolds, we get fun gizmos and action-packed cliffhangers alongside some darker comments about human society.  I really couldn’t put this down, and it kept me guessing until the very end (right after the evil clowns showed up).  Two thumbs up!

I’m just finishing Selden Edwards novel, The Little Book (25.95), and I’m thinking it has a lot to say about everything we want historians to look back at the 20^th century and understand…not just the facts, but the emotion, the pain, the state of the human spirit that lived through so much…maybe it wants to do that.  It’s the story of Wheeler Burden who is a former baseball star and current rock star in contemporary San Francisco.  He ends up travelling back in time to late 1800s Vienna, a place he knows well since his most adored teacher in junior high was obsessed with sharing his knowledge of the city.  Wheeler meets and discusses psychotherapy with Freud, listens to Mahler’s great symphonies, and hears the early rumblings of anti-Semitism.  It’s when he meets certain other people that we get a real idea of what’s going on here…sort of.  To say much more would give away some fun twists, but as much as I’ve enjoyed the plot, I’ve probably enjoyed the character of the city of Vienna even more.

Danny Goldberg’s Bumping Into Geniuses ($26) is a treat for those of us who enjoy reading about the music business.  Goldberg got his start at Billboard magazine and ended up being one of the early critics at the famed Crawdaddy magazine.  He’s had a pretty varied career as a critic, a PR person (for Led Zeppelin), and a manager (Stevie Nicks, Nirvana), and the real sense you get from his book is that he genuinely enjoys music.  That’s not always true of people writing in this genre.  But he also really understands the business side of things, and whether he’s talking about the beginnings of the FM radio format, the early rock record labels, or the disintegration of the manager/artist relationship, he never shorts either side of the equation.  Patti Smith is a fan…’nuff said.  --Joan