It's a rare but wonderful thing when a review convinces you to read a book you might otherwise never encounter, much less read. It's not that Austerity Britain is a book I would avoid. In fact, even a brief description -- a close look at post-war Britain, including the use of several diaries by everyday people -- makes it sound eminently worthy. But it's also 700 pages, and if you're like me, the to-read pile is already teetering ominously several feet above your head.

But in this month's Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz writes a lengthy recommendation, and doesn't skimp on the praise. This is how he begins:

Jamestown, a novel by Matthew Sharpe, is a mess, but only in the way a lumberjack breakfast is a mess. Eggs, bacon, ham, pancakes, toast, jam, syrup, coffee, and juice? I say, if it fits on the table, bring it on.

Sharpe's story, which reimagines the Jamestown settlement in a post-apocalyptic U.S. in the not-too-distant future, is built to be a love-or-hate affair. Needless to say, I loved it. For one thing, it's laugh-out-loud funny (I'm going to see how many hyphens I can use in this post), and that's rare. For another, it presents Pocahontas as a nineteen-year-old who occasionally addresses the reader as "y'all," and says things like, "Pocahontas is my nickname, it means 'person who cannot be controlled by her dad.' "

Well, OK, Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan has covered a lot of this territory, but if, like me, you happen to believe that--especially in technologically confident America--we vastly overestimate our control of our own lives and underestimate the role of luck and randomness, you cannot get enough of this subject. Mlodinow's examples of the role that chance plays in our lives are funny and trenchant. They help to instill the kind of stoicism we need to deal with random setbacks--and triumphs. (Everyone knows that lottery winners sometimes go on to have miserable lives.) Mlodinow's ideas, like Taleb's, should change the way you look at not only life but your own life.

Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is one of the smartest, funniest writers in the country. His book, Land of Lincoln, was praised by every major newspaper and writers like Doris Kearns Goodwin, Terry Teachout, and Christopher Buckley. But unless I’m mistaken, the book never really shot up the sales charts. The paperback, out now, deserves to move more units.

On the surface, the book is a lark, with Ferguson traveling all over the U.S. to discover the current place of Lincoln (we’re talking Abe, by the way) in the country’s imagination. His itinerary includes a stop -- and this is not a misprint -- at an annual convention of the Association of Lincoln Presenters (they don’t like the word “impersonators”) in Santa Claus, Indiana. But Ferguson’s deep intelligence guaranteed the book would be as insightful as it is comical.

He writes in the preface:

Lara Vapnyar, born in Russia, first made her literary-emigre name with a collection of stories called There Are Jews in My House. Her third book, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, is a slender but rigorously concentrated one. It returns to that demanding--and I think, in our era, deeply undervalued--form. Each story is centered around food. In one, a Russian carpet installer, lonely for his wife back home, tries trading money for sex but finds the woman's borscht much more warming than her body. In another, before going back to join her boyfriend and her family at the table, a young woman goes out to look at the snow in Brooklyn: "I slowly take it in, the powdered cars, the timid light of lampposts, the naked twigs of the cherry trees."

You won't know the answer to the title's question when you've finished What is Life? by Ed Regis, but, if you haven't already read deeply in this philosophical/scientific subject, you will learn a lot from the author's concise presentation of various efforts to define biological existence and create life. The most intellectually compelling part of what is basically a long essay is the author's analysis of man's own efforts to make living physical--well, things--out of inanimate ingredients. But the central mystery remains as mysterious as ever--in my opinion there will never be an answer (as there will never be an answer to "What is consciousness?"). And so maybe the song lyric--"just a bowl of cherries"--is ultimately no worse a response than all the research in the world might provide.