The average citizen, playing with his or her iPhone, spares not a moment's thought for the scientists who made it possible. Happily, a worthy remedy to this shameful gap in our communal knowledge comes in Frank Close's The Infinity Puzzle. Written with pellucid prose, a keen eye for salient details, a talent for the illuminating metaphor, a passion for the topic, and a novelist's gift for portraiture, narrative, and suspense, this book plumbs the rich roots of our current scientific understanding of how the universe works, down where it all gets fuzzy and weird.

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No amount of prior study or imaginative mental time-travel can prepare the reader for the outré and unsettling sights to be found in Julia Suits's wild and wacky...The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions. Burly, topless businessmen clad in hula skirts and ankle bells. Blindfolded clerks riding a Satan's Derby's worth of mechanical goats. Regally crowned shopkeepers plummeting down trick staircases. Farmers committing suicide by cannonball. The mind reels, as these uncanny vestiges of an extinct realm tease our wits and senses with devilish confusion. Chaos reigns supreme!

In the wake of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il's death, suggestions for reading about the enigmatic nation have been circulating via Twitter, including frequent mention of Adam Johnson's forthcoming novel The Orphan Master's Son, which follows a boy from life in the labor camps to work as a professional kidnapper.

Earlier this year the BNR featured a Five Books list of informative titles about Korea -- North and South -- led by Barbara Demick's penetrating study Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

The full list of suggestions follows.

 Atlantic contributing editor and BNR contributor Graeme Wood discusses the influence and legacy of Christopher Hitchens.

"Even those who were on the opposite side of any argument from Christopher Hitchens," writes A.C. Grayling, "were compelled to admire the sharpness, control, and extraordinary richness of his mind."

Click "Read More" to see his full rememberence.

The literary world grapples with an enormous loss today:  Journalist, author, and provocateur Christopher Hitchens has died of pneumonia, arising from cancer of the esophagus.  His death was announced by Vanity Fair, where he had been a contributing editor since 1992. 

His reputation was built on his eloquence, his delight in putting entrenched opinions to challenge, and his eager assumption of Orwell's mantle as a defender of truth against ideological distortion. His impact as a stylist -- Hitchens wielded both a deadly wit and an implacable sense of joy in literary combat -- was as large on his fellow writers as his politically unclassifiable positions (he defended atheism as fiercely as he did the War in Iraq) have been on the surrounding culture.

Wondering what to get the chef in your life? We asked Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of America's Test Kitchen and author of such delicious cookbook classics as The Cook's Bible and Fannie's Last Supper, to share with us his Holiday Cookbook Buyer's Guide for 2011. Click to see his mouthwatering choices

The transgressive writer Samuel Delany has theorized that one major reason for the creation of cities in the history of civilization was to provide more and better sex than could be found in pastoral or village settings. By this measure -- and according to the randy evidence found in the endlessly entertaining, illuminating and simply shocking new book by Catharine Arnold, The Sexual History of London, that storied city must be accounted a shining beacon in humanity's progress.