Quick — take a look around your computer. What do you see?

Coffee cup stains, post-it notes, photos haphazardly taped to the wall, a cube wall overflowing with colorful leaves of paper, newspaper clippings, stickers, schedules and calendars, super hero action figures, photos and printouts of your favorite musicians, Far Side comics ripped out of a date book and taped to the wall, unopened bottles of juice, an ancient jar of peanuts, a bottle of body spray, a Mardi Gras mask and beads, fingernail clippers, a bottle of eye drops, an empty bottle of lotion, a tray of pennies, lots of dust, a stray ring and bracelet, a handwritten list of phone numbers, a stack of yellowed newspapers, an empty Altoids tin, an Apple sticker placed on top of a Dell logo, and wires wires wires everywhere you look?

Or do you see a pristine desk with a manicured inbox, push pins neatly aligned along your cube wall, a few carefully placed framed photos on your computer, and not a speck of dirt or dust to be found?

Or something completely different?

Sam Gosling, super snooper and author of Snoop: What your Stuff Says About You ($26, Basic Books), could look at your surroundings and tell you a lot about your personality — way beyond whether or not you’re a compulsively slobby hoarder (ahem) or an anal-retentive neat freak. Gosling has formulated fairly scientific ways of observing people’s surroundings — especially those they control and take pride in — and uses the data to determine a person’s level of openness, friendliness, neuroticism, originality, agreeableness, and more.

And best of all? He outlines lots of ways to help the common observer become an expert snooper, which can help anyone who cares to pay attention to the clues navigate the choppy waters of personal interaction.

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  “The Great Derangement:

A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,”By Matt Taibbi(Spiegel & Grau, New York, $24, hardback, 270 pages)

This book has some real gems of insight — wisdom, even.

Check this one out, for example:

“When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.” (P.132)

Unfortunately, such valid points are scattered thinly — and with considerably more verbiage — through 270 pages of smarmy, self-righteous, arrogance trying to masquerade as humor.

Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh at some of this.

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David Sedaris has made his life’s work by writing about the random stuff that happens to him. Most reviews of his books will laud the way in which he makes the mundane so hilarious. This blows my mind, because there is rarely anything mundane that happens in a David Sedaris book. Working as one of Santa’s elves? Having OCD? Trying to quit smoking by vacationing in Japan? Moving to France and trying to learn the language? Sitting in a doctor’s waiting room in nothing but underwear? Hitchhiking and being asked by a trucker perform sexual favors? Dealing with the death of a darkly hilarious, chain-smoking mother?

Maybe I lead an exceptionally boring life, but none of that stuff sounds the slightest bit mundane to me.

And yet, I see where that particular bit of praise originates from. The events in Sedaris’ books are themselves quite fantastical and off the wall. But his delivery is so deadpan that the reader is, in effect, duped into thinking of them as mundane, everyday occurrences, viewed through a particularly sharp and witty lens. And maybe it’s just me, but that lens is so sharp that it results in books that make me laugh out loud. That’s pretty rare.

Sedaris’ latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames ($26, Little, Brown and Company) follows the same basic formula as his past collections: Several essays of varying weight that self-deprecatingly chronicle his life and the people around him, spanning his entire lifetime. It’s a great read, and a quick one, especially if you skip the bits you might have already read (the story about his being on a plane seated next to a Polish man who wouldn’t stop crying ran in The New Yorker earlier this year) or heard (the bit about the Stadium Pal and shopping with his sister Amy were included on a recording of him reading at Carnegie Hall several years ago).
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 ”Shinjuku Shark”By Arimasa Osawa

Translated by Andrew Clare

Vertical Inc.

Paperback, $14.95

285 pages

Both my kids have taken four years of Japanese under “Irigashi Sensei” at White Station High School, and I sincerely hoped I would like this book, the first English translation of a series of police procedurals that are extremely popular in Japan.

I do like the characters and the story, but the translation has serious problems.

The Shinjuku Shark is the nickname of the book’s hero, Samejima, a rogue, loner cop who won’t kowtow to his go-long-to-get-along superiors in the Japanese police hierarchy.

He has a beautiful rock singer girlfriend, Sho, who seems to be poised to launch into stardom.

The plot involves a gay, sadistic maker of illegal firearms and a mysterious serial killer who targets young police officers.

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When I was in high school and fully submerged in my angsty adolescent phase (that still hasn’t quite worn off), I took to carting around shockingly weird, very adult books to show how hip and edgy and literary I was. Heh.

Sure, the teachers could make us read A Separate Peace or The Great Gatsby during summer vacation, but you better believe that from August until May, I’d have A Clockwork Orange, Jim Carroll’s poetry, or anything by William S. Burroughs (or the other Beats) tucked under my arm for the trek between classes. (My aunt gave me a copy of Naked Lunch for Christmas my senior year after my mom told her that’s the novel I’d been hinting at wanting to read next. I don’t think either of them had ever read it or else they probably wouldn’t have let it come within a hundred feet of my impressionable eyes.)

Here I am several years later (I won’t say how many) and I still remember being quite weirded out by the grotesque imagery in Naked Lunch. Plus I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what that book is about … except Mugwumps. Yep. Boy, do I remember the Mugwumps. I suppose a re-reading is in order to see if the weirdness still stands.

Anyway, my point is, the weirdness of that novel has stuck with me all these years. Up until this past winter, I’m pretty sure that was the weirdest book I’d ever read. That was prior to my encounter with The White Hotel, a novel by D.M. Thomas recommended to me by a friend.

The White Hotel is one of the most interesting, depressing, randy, confounding books I’ve ever read. It features several narrative forms, and includes erotic surrealist poetry, clinical letter correspondence, straight-up fantasy narrative, and a depressingly authentic Holocaust story arc. So much about it is so ridiculous, yet so much about it is so amazingly profound. And quite beautifully written. It’s a complex book.

And it’s weird.

So what’s the weirdest book you’ve ever read?

Award-winning author Ann Tyler’s 14th book, “A Patchwork Planet,” gets the nod from the Columbian Spectator to represent Maryland in the 50 States of Literature series.

Unlike last week’s pick for Louisiana, we can live with this.

It actually seems like a pretty good choice. Ann Tyler lives in Baltmore, and most of her novels are set in Maryland. She’s got gravitas, winning the Pulitzer for “Breathing Lessons,”  and making the finalist list two other times — with “Accidental Tourist” and “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.” And incidentally, she went to grad school at Columbia.

I’ve read a couple of Tyler’s books, but haven’t read “A Patchwork Planet.” Here’s a description from the Columbian Spectator. 

Anyone out there read it? Is it a good choice for Maryland?

BSI-Starside: Final Inquiries
By Roger MacBride Allen
Bantam Spectra, 2008
Paperback, $6.99
421 pages
If you’re looking for something light, not too disturbing, that combines police procedurals with speculative science fiction, this may be worth picking up.
“Final Inquiries” seems to be the second in a series about a couple of “space-cops,” as it were, in an organization called the Bureau of Special Investigations, which has the duty of looking into crimes involving humans outside of the Earth system and those that involve interactions between humans and alien intelligent beings.
Allen is the spouse of a U.S. Foreign Service operative, and he uses that experience to build interesting details into this particular work, involving high-stakes interstellar diplomacy and death.
The human heroes of the story are Hannah Wolfson, the senior BSI agent, and Jamie Mendez. (Romance isn’t really a factor in this story.)

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I took a fiction-writing course from Barry Hannah (Airships, Geronimo Rex)  years ago, and wrote a short story called “Work” that he dismissed out of hand. (well, he did like one sentence in it.) It was about fear and loathing and paranoia resulting from some petty changes in titles at a corporate office. Hannah said, “Nobody cares about work. They read fiction to escape from it.”  I have to say, when I read about Joshua Ferris’s book Then We Came to the End  (Little, Brown, $24), and learned that it was mostly, almost only, about work, it didn’t make me want to snatch it up. But the reviews were so good, and it was on The New York Times’ list of five best fiction works of 2007. So I got it, and no regrets. Opposite. In fact, when I finished I went back and read it again because it was so funny. (I’m  laughing right now about a description in this Ferris book of a guy whose creaky crutches made him sound like a 19th century whaler.) 

This is the Office Space  of novels. It’s been compared to Catch-22   and that seems fair. What Joseph Heller did to the military in Catch-22  he tried to do to work in Something Happened,   but that book just made me grimace.

Then We Came to the End  is life contained in three floors, 60 stories up, in a Chicago office building. The narrator is the corporate “we,” vindictive, selfish, irrational and hilarious. It’s an addictive voice that nails the petty collective life of the cubicle. “How we hated our coffee mugs! our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned into cloying reminders of time served.” And the insane way modern life separates work from reality: “What sort of person showed up on Monday and had no interest in sharing what transpired during the two days of the week when one’s real life took place?” There are included in the “we” a lot of fully realized, recognizable characters — Marcia, whose hair and music are stuck in the ’80s; Lynn Mason, the elegant and inscrutable boss; Tom Mota, who should have been a landscaper; Benny, whose office is gossip central.

And there’s a nice  revelation about “us” at the very end.