The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez

I have a huge crush on Mack Megaton, a seven-foot tall robot with a free will glitch who becomes a reluctant detective and refers to humans as “squishy biologicals.” Mack is the main character in the wittiest book I’ve read this year, and possibly the best book I’ve read since The Help, which is saying a lot since The Help is a literary blockbuster and The Automatic Detective is sci-fi pulp fiction.

Apparently this theme isn’t original, i.e., Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel, and I-Robot among others, but it’s new to me, and I loved it! Just imagine a hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler detective mystery, set in a bizarre retro near-future full of mutants, aliens from an undisclosed universe, and robots. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it does in the book. I wouldn’t have picked this book if I’d known what it was about, but people were raving about it so I decided to give it a try, and I’m glad I did.

Mack Megaton, seeking a more human existence and citizenship in a world oozing biological nastiness and mutant creatures, gets dragged into the rescue of a human family of friends who have been kidnapped in a bizarre conspiracy. Forget about that though as the story is secondary to the hilarious dialogue and whacky characters. I loved Jung, Mack’s sidekick, a gorilla-like human who loves to read Jane Austen. And get this, Mack is all man, but he’s not sexual. There are sexy women characters and seductions, but there is no sex, zero, zip, nada.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography by Rob Lowe

I didn’t want to read Rob Lowe’s autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, and I sure didn’t want to like it, but I did both. When I told my hubby who was equally disinterested in Rob Lowe that I’d really enjoyed Lowe’s book, he said, “What was so good about it?” I effortlessly ticked off the following:

1.   Lowe apparently wrote Stories I Only Tell My Friends, himself, and he did a good job. His mother was a prolific, yet seldom published writer, and his family ran in a pretty educated circle. This literate foundation provided a more apt and cultivated narrative than I expected. No doubt he has a good editor too. Plus Jodie Foster is one of his best friends, and I doubt she suffers dummies.

2.   I listened to the audio version of the book, and was entertained and amused by Lowe's exceptional voice impersonations of the many recognizable characters he talked about in his book. The way he introduced his famous friends was fun too - almost like a game of charades. He would tell a little bit of a story about someone, tossing out clues, then came the big reveal. I had fun trying to guess who he was introducing based on a clue like, “We both took our trash out on Tuesdays, and he would fix me with that look and say, ‘I’ll be back.’” Well, not that obvious, but you get the picture (no pun intended).