Mark is enthusiastic about the Stephanie Plum novels.

There was a (gasp!) delay between recording and posting this episode, so a lot of the books that we talk about as ‘coming soon’ are now, in fact, ‘out recently’ and in some cases ‘out quite a while ago’. We’re still excited about them, though.

We talk about:

• Janet Evanovich
• Kristen Cashore‘s Bitterblue
• Dan Chaon’s short story collection Stay Awake. The episode where Mark is enthusiastic about his novel Await Your Reply is here, and Jon weighs in here.
• Mark Haddon’s The Red House. His prize-winning art.
• Mark Leyner’s The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack
• Veronica Roth‘s Insurgent. Jon is enthusiastic about Divergent here.
• Greg Rucka’s Alpha. Rucka talks about writing female characters here.
• John Scalzi’s Redshirts
• Darwyn Cooke’s graphic novel adaptation of Richard Stark’s (Donald Westlake’s) The Score.
• Jonathan Tropper’s One Last Thing Before I Go. Jon is enthusiastic about This Is Where I Leave You here.
• Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities. Jon is enthusiastic about Ship Breaker here.
• The over-the-top press release for Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her. Jon is enthusiastic about The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in the prehistoric days of the podcast here.
• Mark Helprin’s In Sunlight and in Shadow.
• Neal Stephenson and co.’s The Mongoliad.
• Daniel Suarez’ Kill Decision. Mark is enthusiastic about Daemon (another one from the early days) here. Jon jumps on the bandwagon here.
• Mark discovers Lee Child’s Reacher books.
• One for the Money (film) on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.
• Christa Faust’s Money Shot.
• The House to Astonish podcast. (The ‘two Scottish guys’ are Paul O’Brien and Al Kennedy, and they’re genius. We don’t know why Jon kept referring to them like that, as if they were the podcasting equivalent of Macbeth.)