Opinion

Required Reading

Turn Around Bright Eyes

The Rituals of Love and Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield (It Books)

Rolling Stone columnist Sheffield follows up his bittersweet memoir “Love is a Mix Tape” with a redemptive tour through New York’s karaoke scene. Here you’ll find late night renditions of Hall & Oates and a few out-of-tune Boy George classics, too. Through these songs, Sheffield nurses a broken heart (his first wife died in her 30s, the subject of his first memoir), but his karaoke insights provide fun background noise: “There is simply no other American ritual that rewards people for doing things they suck at doing.”

Big Egos

A Novel

by S.G. Browne (Gallery Books)

Fantasy and reality blur in this satirical takedown of celebrity culture. In the not-so-distant future, thanks to a new DNA cocktail, $3,000 can buy you a new persona (Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, even Harry Potter — as long as they are dead or fictional) for the night. The company Big Egos markets with the slogan: “Does your lifestyle not fit the person inside you? Try someone on for size!” The narrator, who works for Big Egos, is the “ultimate ego-tripper” and can’t stop taking on new identities.

Babayaga

A Novel

by Toby Barlow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

A beautiful serial-killing witch. An undercover CIA operative who is in love with her. A detective turned into a flea who wants to bring her down. Sound crazy? It is. All of these elements could make for messy reading, but thankfully we’re in the capable hands of Barlow, who gives us a Bond-like, supernatural “True Blood”-esque romp through 1950s Paris.

The Telling Room

A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese

by Michael Paterniti (The Dial Press)

A book about cheese blurbed by Susan Orlean, George Saunders and Dave Eggers? Then again this is no ordinary piece of cheese. In fact, this $22-a-pound cheese is believed to recover long-lost memories. Kings have begged for a slice. And its maker is ready to kill for it. Paterniti, author of best-seller “Driving Mr. Albert,” brings us along on a poetic narrative non-fiction ride through the cheese’s birthplace, a small village in Spain with a population of 80, where Paterniti lived for nearly a decade trying to unravel the mysteries.

Shoot the Dog

A Virgil Cain Mystery

by Brad Smith (Scribner)

The third installment of Smith’s country noir series continues the story of straight-shooting horse trainer Virgil Cain, who gets caught up on the set of a movie that is filming in his Hudson Valley home. When the lead actress winds up dead — and a ripped from the headlines, thinly-veiled Lindsay Lohan arrives to replace her — trouble starts a-brewin’..