Since we rag on Franzen here occasionally, I wanted to put in a quick plug for his new collection of essays, How to Be Alone, which is quite fine. I actually enjoy Franzen's nonfiction rather more than his fiction, which is probably backwards from the way most people experience his work. The best essay in the book is the first one, and you can read it online: "My Father's Brain," about his father's decline from Alzeimer's. (You may have seen this one before, as I had.) The other essay which best grabbed my attention was a sort of journalistic human-interest piece about the failures of the Chicago postal system which doesn't seem to be online anywhere.

If those two essays sound like they shouldn't be in the same book, you've stumbled upon my central critique of How to Be Alone, which is a startling lack of either stylistic or thematic unity. Some essays are personal, some essays are objective, some are highly imaginative, some are quite prosaic -- this doesn't feel like a collection the way, say, The Undertaking or even Lethem's The Disappointment Artist (blogged) does. It's a good book, just oddly disjointed.

Speaking of odd? Oddly missing: The infamous Peanuts essay.