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Hildur Knútsdóttir’s debut, The Night Guest, is the kind of cagey thriller that begs you to read it in a single sitting. That’s how I read the book, and Knútsdóttir rewards antsy readers who are rushing toward the story’s climax with plenty of stub-short chapters and blank pages that play up the drama of the plot.

It’s a story about an Icelandic woman who always wakes up feeling even more tired than she did when she went to sleep. There’s no medical reason for her weariness, or for the bruises and cuts that she wakes up with occasionally. As she explores her bizarre condition, the city of Reykjavik becomes the setting for a cat-and-mouse chase that could be nothing more than a cat chasing its own tail.

I whipped through this book, and if you’ve been having trouble focusing on a novel I’d easily recommend The Night Guest. It’s one of those thrillers that’s almost more difficult to not read—a dirty, messy little thriller that leaves plenty of its gory details to the reader’s imagination.

Like Love and Happiness, Angel Down is a novel told in one long gallumphing run-on of a narrative. Love and Happiness is a single paragraph, and Angel Down is a single breathless sentence, chopped up into paragraphs.

I’d already read Daniel Kraus’s thriller Whalefall, about a man who is swallowed by a whale, so I’m familiar with his particular style of Biblical obsessions. But Angel Down is even more baroque than Whalefall, as you might expect from a World War I novel about some troops finding an angel in no man’s land.

Unfortunately, the premise of the book interested me more than the execution. Between the over-the-top constraints and Kraus’s seeming intent to really Hammer Home the Point, the novel felt more like an essay about a great book than a great book itself.

The whole time I read Angel Down, I couldn’t stop thinking about another overambitious, under-satisfying war novel with a fantasy twist—Chris Adrian’s debut novel, Gob’s Grief, which was about a main character who wanted to build a device to bring all those killed in the Civil War back to life. Ultimately I wonder if it’s possible to satisfactorily blend the unrelenting reality of war with the suspension of disbelief required from big genre ideas.

After the debacle that was Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern movie, I never thought I’d be excited about another Green Lantern adaptation again. It doesn’t help that the comics have long since fallen into the modern superhero maximalist tropes of a massive cast of super-powered characters that never take off their costumes or have human problems or explore any ideas other than the comic’s own convoluted decades of lore. When Geoff Johns added a rainbow of colored rings to the Green Lantern comics, all based on emotion—even though will power, which has always powered the green rings at the center of the story, isn’t an emotion—he pretty much killed my interest in the character. Ryan Reynolds and his smirk were just the tombstone on top of the grave.

So it’s surprising that I’ve enjoyed the Lanterns show on HBO enough that I’ve watched a few of the episodes multiple times already, even though the season isn’t over yet. The writing is clever, the budgetary constraints feel somehow liberating, and the actors are all stellar. Kyle Chandler makes Hal Jordan, a character I’ve never liked, into a sad-sack braggart who is way more likable than he should be.

But the real reason Lanterns is so watchable, and re-watchable, is Aaron Pierre, an actor who blew me away in the excellent Netflix movie Rebel Ridge. (Yes, it’s hard to recall now but Netflix used to make excellent movies.)

Pierre is the most uniquely watchable new star that I’ve encountered in a long time, in part because he’s got a presence that is so unlike most actors. It’s his silence and restraint that make him so compelling.

On screen, he’s a placid pool that you gaze into, hoping to see a hint of the ferocious currents that you know are flowing just under the surface. He somehow made Rebel Ridge into an action film in which you’re grateful when he avoids a big action set piece. It’s so much fun to watch him coil in preparation that you almost don’t need to watch him strike.

Lanterns and Rebel Ridge both offer roles in a similar register for Pierre—the highly capable quiet guy who feels coiled and ready for action at a moment’s notice. But in Lanterns he’s getting a chance to allow the viewer in and see a little bit of the humanity. He occasionally makes mistakes, he sometimes indulges his worst instincts, and we love him all the more for it.

All my life, I’ve been waiting for the second coming of Lee Marvin, the tough-guy actor who always delivered more menace than his film’s scripts ever actually called for. I thought for a while that Jason Statham was that guy, but he proved to have a little too much self-knowing charm to fit the bill. It’s possible that Pierre could be the heir to Marvin’s throne, or at least he’s certainly mastered the scornful silence that made Marvin so fun to watch.

It all comes down to this: It is somehow more entertaining to watch Pierre not punch an idiot in the mouth than it is to watch him haul off and take a swing. That’s star material if I ever saw it.

Fairy tale retellings aren’t typically my bag. They often topple over into cutesy-poo productions that wind up being nothing but stories about stories. So ordinarily, I would have left the YA graphic novel

Wolf’s Belly on the shelf. After all, I have seen, read, and heard more variations of the Little Red Riding Hood story than I can count.

But I took Wolf’s Belly out from the Seattle Public Library because it’s written by screenwriter John August, who co-hosts the Scriptnotes podcast that is a regular part of my Saturday walking practice. I was interested to see how his lifetime of screenwriting would translate into a first-time graphic novel project.

The answer to that question is, pretty darn well. Wolf’s Belly is a little heavy on the dialogue, but it’s nothing like the flood of molasses that usually escapes captivity when a novelist writes their first comic book. Simon Estrada, the artist, has plenty of room to charm readers with his character designs and painterly color palette.

On the whole, I liked Wolf’s Belly a lot. The story proposes to tell the true story of Little Red Riding Hood—one of the least original propositions in all of literature—but it also mashes up a bunch of fairy tales about wolves and experiments with various children’s storytelling formats in intriguing ways. It is a story about storytelling, but it actually has something to say.

My biggest complaint about the technical artistry of Wolf’s Belly is the lettering. The word balloons are presented as rectangles, and the text is all the exact same weight, which gives the sense of an audiobook being read by a monotonous narrator. Good lettering accompanies and enhances comics art. The lettering in Wolf’s Belly is more or less just slapped onto the art.

But I’m pleasantly surprised to report that I really dug Wolf’s Belly overall and I’m planning to buy multiple copies for the kids in my life who like fairy tales and/or comics.

I finally read Caro Claire Burke’s blockbuster novel Yesteryear, a buzzy book about a tradwife influencer who finds herself transported back in time to those “simpler days” that tradwife culture is so nostalgic for—when women were women and men were men and families lived off the land.

Credit where it’s due: Burke knows how to write a goddamned page-turner. I hated setting Yesteryear down and when I finally cracked it open again I gulped paragraphs down like a drowning man gasping for air. Unlike most writers who have a formula for page-turning thrillers—I’m thinking of Dan Brown and his neverending series of cascading cliffhangers—I don’t exactly understand how Burke pulled this off. That is to say, I don’t know how she made the book as propulsive as it is.

But with all that said, I do have a Hot Take about Yesteryear. Are you ready? I think the book would be better without the time travel element.

But Paul, I can hear you say, that’s the whole reason the book is popular!

Sure, fine. But I think there’s a very slender little novel hiding inside this book that is just a vicious satire of tradwives and influencers, and I think I would enjoy that book even more than I enjoyed Yesteryear. The time travel makes the book a little too obvious, a little too heavy. But I defy you to read the first chapter, when we follow the main character through an ordinary day in her life, and show me a single line that could be edited out.

It is taut as a motherfucker, a thrilling highwire act from a writer who is supremely confident about where she’s going and what she has to say. If the whole book carried that searing tone, you would have had to surgically remove Yesteryear from my fingertips. As it is, I “merely” lost a couple of hours of sleep staying up with the book until I finished it.

My friend Clinton gave me some old paperback curiosities a while back and I finally read the first in the stack: Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s, written by Max Boas and Steve Chain. I went through a period where I read everything I possibly could about McDonald’s because I found the scale of the business to be so mind-boggling that I couldn’t fathom how it worked. Ray Kroc’s autobiography, Grinding It Out, was not very helpful in that regard, but it was pretty entertaining.

Somehow during that McDonald’s-obsessed period I never came upon a used copy of Big Mac, and I wished that I had—it’s a book that was published in 1976, back when McDonald’s was still a relatively new phenomenon and Ray Kroc was still alive and giving interviews. It’s written in that shaggy pseudo-gonzo style that was in fashion at the time—a little bit of Hunter Thompson, a little bit of Tom Wolfe, a lot of machismo. And it is very entertaining.

The thing that struck me most about reading Big Mac is that at the time the book was written, the general reading public could be expected to be more or less horrified by giant corporations—the way McDonald’s controls the experience to a level that the interior of a restaurant in Vermont is more or less the same as the interior of a restaurant in Arizona was a disgusting and off-putting thought to pre-globalization America. The authors also recount a speech by Lloyd Bentsen—the Democratic Senator from Texas, if you can imagine such a thing—giving a speech disparaging the fact that McDonald’s was becoming a bigger profit center in the American economy than steel manufacturers.

Overall, Big Mac is an entertaining and outdated guide to the history of McDonald’s as it was 50 years ago. I wouldn’t recommend that everyone rush out and read it, but if you’re looking for a record of the history of our tolerance of corporate power and reach, it’s a very interesting document.