Check It. 'Moonwalking with Einstein'.

While perusing the New York Times this morning, I found an excellent book review of Joshua Foer's (brother of Jonathan Safran Foer) latest: a reflection on our collective loss of memory.

Foer's "Moonwalking with Einstein" stems from a 2006 article he wrote for Slate.com. According to NYT, in this book Foer like Malcolm Gladwell makes scientific concepts tangible and easy to read, which I definitely believe.

With his smart, but conversational tone and powerful storytelling I can only imagine this is going to be another hit.

-- Lauren Williams

*An earlier version of this post mistakenly attributed the "Einstein" to Jonathan Safran Foer. Thanks for the heads up, readers!

Do It. Books for Valentine's Day.

If you're looking for something to read to give you that warm, fuzzy feeling on The Day of Love, I have read no book that makes me that happy feeling more then "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Although not touching upon romantic love in anyway, the deep love between Oscar and his father and the parallel story between his grandmother and grandfather reflects a love so intense it's hard to believe these people are fictional characters.

The book is written in a unique blend of photos, images, blank pages, and uses a play on kerning that creates a very unique, quirky narrative, much like the interesting, three-dimensional characters that you don't want to let go of at the end of the book.

This is absolutely one of my favorite books, and I couldn't think of a better read on Valentine's Day.

-- Lauren Williams

Check It. Jonathan Safran Foer's "Tree of Codes."

I've always been a big fan of Jonathan Safran Foer's work, and also of the art direction of his books -- the free-form text style found on Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is, in my opinion, very fitting of Foer's own writing style. Now apparently, for his new book Tree of Codes, Foer's combined that art direction right into the book itself.

As explained by Foer in the video above, the book is actually comprised of manuscripts of a different book written by a different person: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. Foer used a system of die-cutting -- basically cutting out words or sentences here and there -- to create another story within Schulz's own words. And the cutting is literal within the pages of Tree of Codes.

It's an ambitious but definitely fascinating project, and the perfect gift for any Foer fan or fan of literature, really. Let's see an e-book do this!

Tree of Codes is currently only available to purchase online at Visual Editions (it's technically a little late now to get this ordered and sent for Christmas, but it'll surely be worth the wait!).

-- Chau Tu