New Hipster Book Club

It’s February, and that means we get a new edition of the Hipster Book Club, an interesting site full of reviews and columns on books great and small. Something I love about the HBC (they totally stole Helena Bonham Carter’s acronym, by the way) is that they have a good mix of new and noteworthy books as well as stuff that might have slipped past you, in the rush of new titles. This month’s issue features reviews of The Delivery Man, by Joe McGinniss Jr. (that would be the other Las Vegas novel everyone is talking about), You Must Be This Happy to Enter, by Elizabeth Crane, The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, and Julie Doucet’s 365 Days. Best of all is a column called “The Influence of Anxiety,” which this month features this fine paragraph:

Then there was David Foster Wallace and Mary Karr. My contentious opinion of Mary Karr’s memoir, The Liar’s Club, has been documented previously in this column. Let’s not get into that again! I’m sure it was tough having a suicidal mother, but why did she devote entire chapters to not getting a pony and how they got to the hotel too late for her to go swimming? These are the big events of her childhood? I know a girl who was kicked out of school because her mother would call at least once a week and say, “Send Ellen home, please—I’m going to kill myself.” There was not even a theoretical pony for Ellen. All Ellen wished for was for her mother not to vacuum at two in the morning. (OK, I lied. I got into it again. I can’t help it!)

Sometimes you just find the perfect thing, and it makes your whole morning, you know?