“Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” by Marisha Pessl. Don’t be alarmed by the title, or think (as the man next to me on the train thought when he saw it and remarked, “That’s some heavy reading”) that this is a book about physics. No, it’s a novel, and one of the sassiest, smartest, most thoroughly engaging novels I’ve read all year.

It’s told from the point of view of a super-smart 16-year-old girl named Blue Van Meer who lives with her political-science professor dad. They generally bounce from one small-college town to the next every semester, but the book is set during Blue’s senior year of high school, when they’ve settled in one North Carolina town, allowing Blue to make some friends. Among them is one of her teachers, a beautiful, enigmatic woman named Hannah Schneider. Blue is telling us the story from Harvard a year later, and she informs us up front that Hannah dies during the course of it. How, why, and by whose hand are all mysteries to be explored later.

For the first couple hundred pages, I’d be hard-pressed to say what the book is “about,” as there is no distinct plot line. Things are occurring; it’s just not clear where they’re going. And then the last hundred pages are jam-packed with revelations, surprises, reversals, and a major falling-into-place of pieces.

Yet even before a distinct storyline had emerged, I was still delighted by every page. Pessl (as Blue) writes vividly, with a barrage of pop-cultural, literary and cinematic allusions. She is fond of descriptive metaphors and similes, as when she says a woman’s perfume “hung in the air like a battered piñata.” The writing is marvelously nuanced and careful, always perfectly phrased. People who love words will adore the way Pessl manipulates them.

It’s Pessl’s debut novel, which makes it all the more impressive, and, published in 2006, it is distinctly a product of its day. I don’t just mean because it refers to “The View” and the Internet and Jay Leno. I mean the way Pessl writes is the way young people — smart young people, I mean — actually write and talk in 2006. Just as you can look at “The Great Gatsby” and know by Fitzgerald’s syntax that he was writing in the 1920s, or read “Little Women” and recognize it as being typical of the mid-1800s, people will be able to know by reading “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” 100 years from now that it’s from circa 2000.

Pessl cheerfully turns nouns into verbs (the light “jack-o-lanterned their faces”) and refers casually to films and books that the reader may or may not be familiar with. She is also fond of likening characters to historical and fictional figures, then referring to them thereafter as if they ARE those people. An administrator at Blue’s school, Eva Brewster, is compared to Evita Peron early on; later, Blue figures the reason Ms. Brewster is so stoic is because of “her bastardized birth and impoverished Los Toldos upbringing, the trauma of seeing Augustin Magaldi naked at fifteen, shoving to great political heights the wide load of Colonel Juan, the twenty-four-hour workdays at the Secretaria de Trabajo and the Partido Peronista Feminino, looting the National Treasury, [and] stockpiling her closet with Dior.” A fellow student looks like 1950s actor Sal Mineo; he is forever referred to thus, his real name never mentioned.

If you associate with young people, you will notice that these are all typical of modern speech. Pessl writes in that Buffy/Veronica Mars/Gilmore Girls kind of patter — exaggerated, perhaps, from real life but nonetheless rooted in true speech patterns. It’s a genuine pleasure to read such sparkling, nifty writing.

“Thanksgiving Night,” by Richard Bausch. Bausch is evidently a writer of some renown, but I hadn’t heard of him until his latest novel, “Thanksgiving Night,” was recommended to me. It’s a wonderfully written, marvelously redemptive piece of fiction about several characters in a small Virginia town whose lives intersect in the weeks before Thanksgiving. A married couple find their relationship in trouble; an elderly priest wonders if he’s right for the priesthood; two old ladies argue over the house they share; the man they’ve hired to do some work on it faces his own demons, and his grown-up daughter, a single mom, tentatively embarks on a new relationship. All of these people are looking for love and acceptance, and it’s quite lovely — not to mention sparklingly entertaining — to read.

I want to quote a passage I like a lot. It’s our first introduction to Brother Fire, the old priest. His name is technically pronounced “fear-ay,” but years ago his fiery demeanor earned the more common pronunciation, and it stuck:

Fact is, he likes the name.

He also likes mornings when the sun breaks through the fog, wind that shakes leaves out of the trees, lightning forking across a summer sky, rivers — all waters, really — plants, animals, birdsong, the roar of lions, music of every type, drums, all the kinds of coffee and tea, cats, dogs, horses, paintings of people bustling by on city streets, paintings of flowers, all the sculptures of Bernini, flying buttresses, those great red sequoias in Northern California, Northern California itself (for the wines), wine, white and red but mostly the reds, especially Italian, the Shenandoah Valley, presidential politics, philosophy, the poetry of John Berryman and Gerard Manley Hopkins (he sees the affinity between them), and, of course, all of Shakespeare. But above everything, he likes people. He loves people. The sweetest music to him has always been the sound of another human voice. What for all others would be the most unattractive, nerve-grating accent pleases him for the fact of its contribution to the happy proliferation of human notes. He enjoys others, not in the abstract way of, say, a Lenin or a Trotsky — though he has always been decidedly leftward-leaning in his politics — but in a very specific and direct way. When you talk to him, you have an immediate sense that he is interested in your benefit, and that you can tell him everything, even when, as it is in the confessional, what you have to report is sordid and full of failure and contradiction. He will tell you — and mean it — that the sign of contradiction is the center of Christianity, that the cross itself is the first sign of contradiction, and that the human condition is in its way similar to that of Christ: that contradiction of being both God and man, and alive on the earth; of possessing an eternal soul yet living in a body that dies. It is all meaning. And meaning, for Brother Fire, is what gives a measure of majesty to ordinary lives. He’s uncomplicatedly convinced of his own ordinariness, and so, when he speaks to his parishioners, this simple faith in that fact and in their charity convinces them, brings them forth in a welter of love, a sweet dependency. His gift, above all else — above the humor and the good nature with others and the charm — is acceptance.

Not only do I find that paragraph splendidly written, but its theology and philosophy feel sound, too, reassuring and comforting.

On the next page, we learn that Brother Fire’s upbringing by decent parents “taught the boy that striving for goodness was inherently goodness itself.” Striving for goodness is inherently goodness itself. Isn’t that profoundly true? If you try to be a good person, you are a good person, because only a good person would bother trying.

The book has a lot of that kind of wisdom blended into its stories about common people and their common struggles. I’m glad I read it — and over Thanksgiving weekend, too, coincidentally.

About five years ago, some Mormon writers banded together to create The Sugar Beet, an LDS-culture version of The Onion, featuring satirical fake news stories. I was one of the writers in that first crew, but then I wandered off after a few months to pursue other interests. The project continued, both as a Web site and briefly as a print publication.

Some of the best material from The Sugar Beet’s entire run has now been collected in a book, “The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer,” available at fine retailers such as Amazon.com or directly from the distributor, Zarahemla Books.

I got my copy in the mail today, and it’s very funny. Anyone with an LDS background (and especially those who have lived in Utah) who also has a sense of humor should find it highly amusing, dancing right on the edge of light-heartedness and light-mindedness.

Some of the articles don’t entirely work because they’re not written in the style of real news stories, and some of the ideas are kinda lame to begin with. But the other 90 percent of the book is a hoot, with headlines like these:

“Area Man’s Mission Years Really Were His Best”
“Cereal and Cheddar Fish Miracle Occurs in Nursery”
“Missionary Now Curses with Near-Native Proficiency”
“BYU-Idaho Students Relieved Austin Powers Movies Aren’t R-Rated”
“Man’s Addiction to Wife Destroying Relationship with Porn”
“Poll Reveals Majority of Men ‘Highly Satisfied’ with Patriarchy”
“Inner Child Found, Baptized”

For me, some of the most laugh-out-loud stuff is in the form of Onion-style “man on the street” interviews and statistical charts. For example:

What phrases do you not want to hear in a patriarchal blessing?

“Morning of the third resurrection”
“Flesh-eating”
“Lazy, shiftless rat-bastard”
“Unfortunate series of events”

Or this:

Brigham Young University has renewed its emphasis against bare midriffs. What do you think?

“It’s a woman’s responsibility not to tempt men, while being sexy enough to make me want to marry her and have babies.”

“I think we should just start pretending that none of us have any naked parts, ever, anywhere.”

“If the girls all cover up, who are we going to blame for our impure thoughts and actions?”

“Well, it makes more sense than the rule against beards. After all, Brigham Young never appeared in public with a bare midriff.”

My one contribution to the book appears on page 72: “Name Withheld Takes Own Life,” in which it is imagined that those inspirational Ensign articles written by “Name Withheld” are the work of the same person, whose name really is Name Withheld, and that all the personal traumas she wrote about finally cracked her. I’m told The Sugar Beet got angry letters as the result of this article when it was first printed, which makes me happy.

So go buy the book. Approximately 1/330th of it was written by me, so I think that means I get royalties. For occasional updates and more samples, visit The Sugar Beet’s blog.

A few books I’ve read recently that I can recommend with a clear conscience. (Some books, you know, if you recommend them you feel bad about it.) The links take you to Amazon, where if you buy anything — even if it’s not the original item you clicked on — I get a tiny kickback, which helps support the site. So buy lots of stuff at Amazon! And check out these books, too.

“The Areas of My Expertise,” by John Hodgman. John Hodgman is perhaps best-known at the moment for being the P.C. in those P.C./Mac commercials. His book is an exercise in absurd erudition, being a faux-intellectual compendium of such “facts” as which presidents had hooks for hands and which colonial jobs involved eels. He also gives a lot of information about hoboes, including a list of 700 hobo names. The book is extremely funny, though it may be too much of a good thing. Best to read it in small doses, not big chunks.

“Consider the Lobster,” by David Foster Wallace. Another very smart man, a writer’s writer, a lover of words and a lover of footnotes, that is David Foster Wallace. This collection of previously published essays covers a variety of topics, from the porn academy awards to a lobster festival, from a Los Angeles talk show host to a review of a new book on grammar and usage (a review which extends to the ongoing debate among traditionalists and modernists). His writing is always intelligent and very often hilarious. As a lover of words myself, I found this one of the most intellectually exciting books I’ve read in a while.

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” by David Eggers. David Eggers founded McSweeney’s, both the quarterly publication and the ongoing Internet concern. (John Hodgman and David Foster Wallace have both written for McSweeney’s, by the way, and I picture the two of them and David Eggers sitting around being smart and witty together.) This book is nonfiction, Eggers’ memoir of how his parents died and he found himself, at the age of 22, caring for his 8-year-old brother. It’s the mid-90s when this happens, and Eggers is heavily into the ironic hipster culture, trying to start a Gen-X magazine, trying to meet women, trying to raise his little brother at the same time. The book is affectionate, funny, poignant, and perhaps more meaningful to people Eggers’ age (e.g., myself) than others. It’s undeniably well-written, however, even if you have little tolerance for 22-year-old hipsters who fancy themselves brilliant writers.

Some books I’ve read recently and can recommend to you. The links in the titles take you to Amazon.com, where if you buy anything — even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on — I get a tiny kickback. So click on a link and do a lot of Amazon shopping, is my point.

“Fablehaven,” by Brandon Mull. With J.K. Rowling about to wrap up her Harry Potter series, the world needs a strong new children’s fantasy series, and I believe “Fablehaven” has every right to be it. Set on a Connecticut preserve for “whimsical creatures” (fairies and brownies, as well as less peaceful beasts), the first book in the series has two children, a brother and sister, visiting their grandparents, who are caretakers of this magical land. Naturally, there is trouble. Mull creates an exciting, imaginative new world, and writes with wit and intelligence. (For once the kids actually talk and act like KIDS.) It’s a few pages before the magic kicks in, but once it does, it’s a fantastic and thrilling read.

“The Brief History of the Dead,” by Kevin Brockmeier. The genius of a good book is in the intangibles, the deft turn of a phrase, the subtle but powerful command of the language. That’s what this intriguing, contemplative novel has going for it, along with a fantastic premise. The chapters alternate between two locations. One is the “city of the dead,” where everyone goes after they die to dwell for a time before finally moving on … to where, no one knows. (No one knows for sure what determines how long they stay here in limbo, either.) The other locale is Antarctica, where a woman is on a research expedition and has thus missed out on the virus that has wiped out most of the world’s population. It’s a sweet, sometimes comical book about life and death and important stuff like that.

“King Dork,” by Frank Portman. Tenth grader Tom Henderson is a misfit and an outcast, forever coming up with band names for his would-be rock group (starring him and his one friend) and trying to stay under the bullies’ radar. He finds his dead father’s copy of “Catcher in the Rye” in the basement, and some notes scribbled in it send him on a search for clues about his old man’s life. The novel is hilariously written from Tom’s point of view, with trenchant observations about high school, rock ‘n’ roll and life in general. One of my favorite funny books of recent months.

Here are a few more from my catch-up started in the last post. You are invited to click the links if you want to buy any of these titles; the links take you to Amazon.com, where I get a tiny kickback if you buy anything there (even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on).

“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” by Jonathan Safran Foer I hate Jonathan Safran Foer for being a successful novelist who is younger and a handsomer than me, but I sure enjoyed this, his second book, about a pleasantly strange 9-year-old boy in search of clues regarding his father’s death on 9/11. I haven’t read Foer’s first work, “Everything Is Illuminated” (though I did enjoy the movie based on it), but it was much better-reviewed than “Extremely Loud.” Maybe it’s so brilliant that “Extremely Loud” seems weak by comparison, but I found the latter novel to be a witty, poignant story about loss and sadness.

“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole. Onto the short list of books I love the most jumps this hysterical masterpiece about a pretentious, over-educated, under-employed, lazy, hypocritical, pontificating, obese New Orleans man named Ignatius J. Reilly. He lives with his mother, avoids work at all costs, goes to movies just to be offended by the sleazy they contain, and is forever complaining about fictitious physical ailments. Toole paints a variety of memorable Louisiana characters whose paths cross Ignatius’, but none are as delightfully loathsome as the great fathead himself. I would love to see a movie version, but I can’t imagine an actor both good enough and fat enough to do him justice.

“Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer,” by James L. Swanson. This non-fiction account of Lincoln’s assassination and the subsequent pursuit of John Wilkes Booth is so well-researched and so craftily told that you’d think you were reading a novel. And yet it’s al true, with no speculative fiction involved: If it’s in quotation marks, someone actually said it. (Swanson used contemporary interviews, court transcripts, and so forth.) And if it’s in the book, it really happened (or at least it is the most reasonable and commonly accepted theory of what happened). Swanson doesn’t burden the book with footnotes or source-citing, though endnotes and a bibliography do assist those looking for documentation or further reading material. He focuses instead on telling an extraordinary story in a clear, accessible, exciting manner. I never would have thought a history book would be a page-turner, but this one is.

I’m supposed to do this every time I read a book worth recommending, yet somehow I’ve failed to do it even once this year. So here’s a little catch-up. You are invited to click the links if you want to buy any of these titles; the links take you to Amazon.com, where I get a tiny kickback if you buy anything there (even if it’s not the item you originally clicked on).

“The Final Solution,” by Michael Chabon. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” wrote this novella about an old man in the 1940s who used to be a big-time detective, is now retired, and becomes involved in solving a case. His name is never given, but we understand: It’s Sherlock Holmes. As always, Chabon writes with a tenderness and eloquence that few other modern writers can match. The story is engaging and satisfying, a great joy to read — and a pretty good Sherlock Holmes story, too!

“Oryx and Crake,” by Margaret Atwood. I had this one read to me on CD by actor Campbell Scott on a road trip. It’s a fine novel, set at some point in the near future, where most of humanity has apparently been wiped out and one man, called Snowman, now lives near the beach and is the only connection the new breed of people — strange, peaceful, childlike adults — have to the old world. Through flashback, we learn how it all happened, and how the evil genius behind it was a friend of Snowman’s. It’s a great story, well told by Atwood.

“A Long Way Down,” by Nick Hornby. The “About a Boy” author’s latest novel is about four strangers who meet on New Year’s Eve on the roof of a building known as a popular suicide spot — which is exactly what they were doing up there, only instead they talk each other out of it, sort of, and become this strange confederation of friends. Like all of Hornby’s work, it’s funny and melancholy simultaneously, a real spirit-lifting pleasure.

“Flicker,” by Theodore Roszak. Here is a big, thick mystery for serious lovers of film, about a man who comes to realize that the works of an obscure B-movie director named Max Castle contain subliminal messages and are part of a larger conspiracy. The fictional Max Castle is folded into real-life film history (he’s said to have assisted Orson Welles on “Citizen Kane,” etc.), and the smartly written, deep-thinking novel demonstrates a genuine passion for the production and viewing of movies. (Note: The book’s title appears in all-capital letters on the cover, “FLICKER,” and at a glance, the “L” and “I” next to each other look like a “U.” I saw more than one person on the train do a double-take when they saw me reading it.)

I have now read all four works by J. Robert Lennon, and I loved them all. Here’s an author no one seems to have heard of who is, nonetheless, astonishingly good.

Let me briefly mention my first two exposures to him. “The Funnies” is a humorous novel about a man who must take over his father’s “Family Circus”-style comic strip when the old man dies, forcing him to face head-on the fact that the idealized version of the family in the cartoon in no way resembles his real-life dysfunctional family. (For example, his brother, the one Dad never liked, doesn’t even have a counterpart in the strip. All other real-life events were mirrored in the comic, except for the birth and subsequent life of that brother.)

Then I read “Mailman,” about a small-town postman who sometimes keeps people’s letters for himself to read. We wander through his memories and his current, cranky musings, and follow him as he flees the wrath of his supervisors and as his world (and his sanity) slowly crumbles around him. Very funny at times, but extremely poignant, too, and a perfect rendering of small-town life.

And now for the other two books by Lennon:

“The Light of Falling Stars” was his first novel, published in 1997. It begins with a small plane crashing in the woods in Montana. From there it follows several threads: the young married couple who live in the house near those woods, who saw the whole thing, and whose marriage was in trouble; the boyfriend of one of the victims; the ex-wife of one of the victims; and a survivor. Lennon’s writing is rich with metaphors, each of them perfectly worded so as to be exactly evocative. You feel what the characters feel — which in this case means sadness, grief, love and hope. It’s truly a beautiful novel.

“On the Night Plain” is nearly as beautiful. It’s set just after World War II and follows a man who leaves his family’s sheep farm to find himself in the world, only to eventually return and inherit the sheep business with his brother. Like the just-mentioned book, it is highly internal and introspective, again brimming with well-constructed similes and metaphors. You think you could never care about a character who runs a sheep farm, but then you read “On the Night Plain” and you care deeply.

The “Eric Recommends” feature, where I would give little book reports on what I’d read recently, isn’t around anymore. It wasn’t getting much use, and we needed space on the navigation bar for other things. Plus, I went through a phase where I was reading a ton of magazines and not as many books.

But lately I’ve had a resurgence, so you can expect several blog entries in the next little while where I recommend some of the more interesting things I’ve read in the past few months. Why, here come a few now!

“Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides. Now here’s a book for you. This Pulitzer Prize-winner tells the story of a Detroit man who was born and raised, until age 14, a girl — an actual hermaphrodite (not like Jamie Lee Curtis, who is only alleged to be one). The writing is fluid and beautiful, and the story — which begins with the subject’s grandparents in Greece — is affecting, funny, harrowing and completely absorbing.

“Frankland,” by James Whorton Jr. No Pulitzers for this slim volume, a jolly, lightweight little comedy about a 28-year-old historian with few social skills heading to rural Tennessee to find long-lost documents pertaining to President Andrew Johnson. He encounters many odd locals and much small-town weirdness on the way, of course. Much of the humor is derived from the protagonist’s formal, polite way of speaking, juxtaposed with the informality of the rural South. I love Whorton’s way with words, too. (Upon encountering a sweaty, loathsome man who has recently infuriated him, our hero says, “If there had been a way to slap his face without touching his face, I would have done it.”)

“Approximately Heaven,” by James Whorton Jr. Having read his second book first, I went back and read James Whorton’s first book second, and liked it even more than “Frankland.” It’s just as funny (albeit in a different way), but it also has just a little bit of weight to it, which “Frankland” does not. This one is still set in the rural South, but it is written from the point of view of one of the locals, and Whorton thoroughly captures his voice, his matter-of-fact way of describing things, his countryfied mannerisms. Beer is a constant bittersweet theme, providing humor as well as pathos, as the protagonist and a buddy of his go on a road trip while the former’s wife is threatening to leave. I heartily recommend this very funny, very endearing novel.

Drop whatever you’re doing, hurry to your nearest book emporium, and buy “A Portrait of Yo Mama As a Young Man” by Andrew Barlow and Kent Roberts. One author contributes humor pieces to The New Yorker; the other writes for The Onion. Both are younger than I am, which makes me extraordinarily angry.

But anyway, this book is hysterically funny, one of the funniest, silliest, most random books I have ever read. It is a 188-page treatise on yo mama and all the things wrong with her.

There are many pages of “yo mama” jokes, but not the sort you hear on the playground. These are non-sequiturs, random insults that are only mildly insulting, or that barely make sense. I quote a few examples:

“Yo mama’s so lupine, she chases rabbits.”

“Yo mama was the subject of the TV movie ‘Fat Insane Whore.’”

“When people look at yo mama’s wedding photos, they remark that she looks ‘haggard.’”

“Yo mama is a poor man’s Roy Orbison.”

“Yo mama spent most of July 1988 in a labyrinth.”

“Yo mama’s so Abraham Lincoln, when someone comes up behind her and shoots her in the head, they say ‘Sic semper tyrannis’ afterwards.”

The book also includes yo mama’s resume (honors and awards include: “Won daughter in pie-eating contest, 1983; Perfect Attendance Award, Northern Arizona Nazis; ‘Caller 105,’ WSMX Hits 105.3 FM, Providence”), some e-mails yo mama wrote you while you were in college, a list of terms yo mama has Googled (“strictly-for-fashion wheelchair,” “how do i get there,” “boxes boxes boxes,” “best way to kick dogs,” “kevin costner + abdominal + november + corn on the cob + my kids + wisconsin newspaper”), and much, much more.

It’s absurdist, ridiculous stuff, and man, does it ever make me laugh. Laugh till I weep. Find it, flip through it, see if it makes you laugh, too. If it doesn’t, we can still be friends, but we cannot get married.

(By the way: If you want to buy the book from Amazon, please use the link above, as I get a tiny referral fee that way. And then perhaps I will reconsider the marriage thing.)