The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth, by Tim Flannery. It means things are going to get really, really hairy in the next seventy years or so. It's not yet too late to ward of some of the scarier results of rapid climate change, but it's getting close.

The Human Country: New and Selected Stories, by Harry Mathews. Short, heady fiction from the American Oulipian.

Nightwork, by Christine Schutt. Brilliantly dark stories.

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot. An odd book with some very, very good parts, and then some not-as-good parts that are not-as-good in interesting ways. Engaging. Longish.

A Girl with a Monkey: New and Selected Stories, by Leonard Michaels. Lyrically intense short fiction that spans this amazingly underrated writer's long career.

Tintin in the New World, by Frederic Tuten. A strange and lovely novel of talk, thought, and layers peeling away. The characters are from Hergé's comic adventure series.