Some Books You Could Read That Weren't Written By Snooki

Unless you’re really into novels featuring peach-shaking, farting protagonists, chances are you might be interested in some recently released reading material that isn’t written by a reality-television star. Luckily, Snooki isn’t the only person to publish a book lately. Below, we’ve compiled several quality reads, some newer, some older, all very much likely better than A Shore Thing—which, to be completely fair, we haven’t read.

Patton Oswalt’s Zombie Spaceship Wasteland
Out yesterday, Booklist describes the first book from one of our favorite funny people thusly: “Comedian Oswalt (The King of Queens, Caprica) offers up a collection of colorful essays ranging in topic from his experiences working at a movie theater to sends-ups of eccentric relatives, including a grandmother who gives exceedingly odd birthday gifts. To delve into the book is to take a tour of Oswalt’s delightfully offbeat mind: he shares with readers what he was doing to procrastinate while writing certain chapters, suggests some truly morbid greeting cards, and parodies the vampire craze in comic-book form. The title is a reference to Oswalt’s theory that creative teens gravitate toward three subjects for their early stories: zombies, spaceships, or wastelands. Oswalt found himself drawn toward wastelands, a natural choice for a comedian who likes to poke fun at society. Oswalt is a wonderfully descriptive writer, vividly evoking his zombielike coworker at the theater, a grim Canadian comedy club, and the wanderings of his teen imagination with sharp, sardonic prose.”

Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
In a Paste feature published in July, Mark Krotov wrote, “The way Gary Shteyngart talks about food—passionately, angrily, referentially—is the way he talks, and writes, about everything. In an age of carefulness and small stakes, Shteyngart’s grand literary ambitions—hilarious, apocalyptic, romantic—evoke Joseph Heller and George Orwell in equal measure and seem just as revolutionary. His new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is a boisterous, romantic, unabashedly political, altogether wonderful vision of a dark, stupid American future.”

Just About Anything From 33 1/3
From Chris Weingarten’s take on Public Enemy, to Amanda Petrusich’s book on Nick Drake to Colin Meloy’s ode to The Replacements, there is much to love in this increasingly famous series. Here’s what Paste‘s Kate Kiefer had to say about Carl Wilson’s rather surprising selection: “No one expected Continuum’s 33 1/3 series to cover Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love—we were used to glowing observations on records that don’t suck, like Pet Sounds and OK Computer and Exile On Main Street. Céline seems like an easy target—she’s just so detestable, especially for fellow Canadians like Globe And Mail writer Carl Wilson. But Wilson avoids cheap shots in favor of a brainy socio-cultural examination of taste: Why do so many people love her? Why do so many more people hate her? What does this say about us as culture consumers? While Love isn’t Dion’s most popular album, it’s her most egregious—mostly because it features that ubiquitous song from Titanic—and Wilson gives it his undivided attention, even attending one of her Vegas shows. Now that’s a devoted author.”

Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals
Anne Lamott writes in her Paste review: “This is an exposé on the industrial factory farms that provide America with 99 percent of its meat and chicken, the barbarity of high-speed industrial slaughter, and the disgusting and unhealthy nature of factory-farmed meat—an argument for why no decent person, especially an environmentalist, should eat meat with a good conscience. Foer writes, ‘We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it would be a horror film.’ He gives truly sickening descriptions of the suffering of factory-farmed animals, plus studies that prove eating meat is a dangerous risk to health. Oh, and he throws in childhood memories and mini-essays on seahorses and kosher foods.”

Keith Richards’ Life
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times had this to say of the Rolling Stones guitarist’s epic memoir: “By turns earnest and wicked, sweet and sarcastic and unsparing, Mr. Richards, now 66, writes with uncommon candor and immediacy… He gives us an indelible, time-capsule feel for the madness that was life on the road with the Stones in the years before and after Altamont; harrowing accounts of his many close shaves and narrow escapes (from the police, prison time, drug hell); and a heap of sharp-edged snapshots of friends and colleagues… But Life…is way more than a revealing showbiz memoir. It is also a high-def, high-velocity portrait of the era when rock ‘n’ roll came of age, a raw report from deep inside the counterculture maelstrom of how that music swept like a tsunami over Britain and the United States. It’s an eye-opening all-nighter in the studio with a master craftsman disclosing the alchemical secrets of his art. And it’s the intimate and moving story of one man’s long strange trip over the decades, told in dead-on, visceral prose without any of the pretense, caution or self-consciousness that usually attend great artists sitting for their self-portraits.”