Villainous behavior comes under intense--and enthralling!--scrutiny in many of this week's most exciting reading recommendations. Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou is "a lyrical and hallucinatory feminist reimagining of classic fairy tales" that appraises the age-old practice of storytelling and mythmaking; while Bad Nature by Ariel Courage is a "provocative, hypnotic" novel of revenge, driven by a "deeply sarcastic, darkly funny, and almost entirely self-aware" narrator who becomes hellbent on killing her father after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis. And Deadstream by Mar Romasco-Moore is "pulse-pounding supernatural thriller" for young adults about a foreboding entity that preys on Internet livestreamers.
And for The Writer's Life, Dutch biology professor Jaap de Roode, author of Doctors by Nature: How Ants, Apes & Other Animals Heal Themselves, reflects on the reading habits of his youth, his appetite for "page-turning thrillers" whenever he flies, and his enduring enjoyment of J.R.R. Tolkien.