Ariel Gore’s Atlas of the Human Heart. Heartbreaking, depressing, funny as hell – in equal measures, sometimes all at the same time.

Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. I read a bunch of reviews that compared this one, unfavorably, to his earlier work Fast Food Nation. I found this to be a worthy follow-up and suspect that it’s the lack of humor in this book that left the critics wanting. It’s much easier to wax poetically wacky about a machine that shoots french fries than about migrant workers in California, outrageous prison terms for medical marijuana possession, or the absurdities of the Meese commissions pornography witchhunts. That doesn’t make the book any less compelling, in fact I sacrificed a lot of sleep while reading it. I don’t know which of his works I’d prounounce “the best”, I thought each stands on it’s own merits.

Schlosser is talking Wednesday night at Politics and Prose, by the way. Let me know if you’re going. (And Jonathan Schell will be there reading from Unconquered World on Tuesday night, incidentally).

Also last week was Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons, Lynn Peril’s dissection of the cult of femininity. (Here’s a tip girls: no matter what the manufacturer told you, never douche with Lysol. Eeeesh).