“I keep saying ‘where’s the body? Kill someone,‘” Marilyn Stasio told us. She reads at least 200 crime novels a year to determine which are worthy of her prestigious “Crime Column” in the New York Times Book Review. We talk with her about crime as entertainment – and why people are so addicted to the genre that she can’t stay away from: “My fingers just itch when I see something that’s says ‘murder.'”

You can find more of Marilyn Stasio’s thoughts on crime fiction in her column.

We want to know what your favorite crime novel is. It can be new or old. Write to us on Twitter @criminalshow, Facebook @ThisIsCriminal, or email us at hello@thisiscriminal.com.

Here is a public domain free ebook of the suggested novel The Moonstone. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/155

Ellis feigns ignorance of all of this. “I was never good at realizing what might offend someone,” he shrugs, unconvincingly. “I’ve been rated and reviewed since I became a published author at the age of twenty-one, and I’ve grown entirely comfortable in being both liked and disliked, adored and despised.” Like much of White, this is disingenuous. People who do not care what other people think do not waste their time telling other people this, and they certainly don’t write books about it.

The comparison between American Psycho’s serial-killer protagonist and its controversial author is easily made. Patrick Bateman and Bret Easton Ellis are both rich. They both attend a lot of dinners. They both admire Donald Trump.

Like The Catcher in the Rye before it and Fight Club after it, American Psycho is a book designed to convince comfortable white men that they are, in fact, “outsiders and monsters and freaks.” Its critique was never just that the shallow consumerism of the Reagan years held, caged beneath it, the bloodthirsty, animal rage of the suppressed individual, but also that even when this rage was unleashed—in American Psycho, through murder, rape, cannibalism, necrophilia—everyone would be too self-absorbed to care.

This was Bateman’s “greatest fear,” Ellis writes in White. “What if no one was paying him any attention?” Ellis does not realize he is talking about himself, an angry, uninteresting man who has just written a very needy book.

I read Lolita as a teenaged girl and to me the book was always about Lolita and her pain, she was the protagonist.

It wasn’t until I saw movie adaptations that I was horrified by the destruction of her voice from the story, the view of her thru the male gaze, thru the gaze of the pedophile, thru the gaze of horny men who had turned her into an object.

Weinman does a tremendous job in recreating the past, understanding the culture of the time, entering the minds of her cast. She explains Ella’s perspective, Sally’s narrow and innocent life experience, as well as the omnipresent threat of reform school being told by a forceful adult male presence. As time passed in Sally’s abduction, and Ella didn’t know whether she was even alive, she said, “Whatever she’s done, I can forgive her,” a telling statement of how victims were, not so very long ago, perceived.

FOR YEARS, we have been warned about the addictive and harmful impact of heavy smartphone and internet use, with physicians and brain specialists raising red flags regarding the cognitive price of these technologies. Many of us now recognize that we are addicts, often joking about it in an attempt to lessen the seriousness of this realization. But what had been missing to really drive the fact of digital dependency home was an admission by those who design the technologies that such was their intended goal. This has now changed as a cadre of IT professionals recently broke their silence on the subject, revealing the motivations behind the creation of some of the world’s most popular apps…

Just finished re-reading Fahrenheit 451 for a book club tonight. Some thoughts. it seems to me it is another book in a long list of books that everyone knows but few people have read and those that haven’t read it think they know what it’s about but really have no idea which is ironic since it’s a book about people not knowing the importance of books. It made me think a lot about apathy, how media can bend opinion and make us cold to human suffering how because we are seeing it on TV it can seem distant not real, happening to someone else. The book also made me think about mass surveillance and how we give it up slowly without noticing or because we think that kind of spying will only be used for good or not on people ‘like us’ It made me think about 1984 and how the dystopia happens without even being noticed how we live in it and don’t even know it. Books like this also make me realize how little male authors think about how racism and misogyny play into creating these dystopian problems. All the books that the men in the resistance are remembering are written by men. Everything comes crashing down and we remember the men first when we rebuild. The women and poc get lost to history, found again like needles in haystacks by only the most dedicated people. Maybe if we remembered them first we wouldn’t keep making these same mistakes. We keep rebuilding on the same civilization on the same foundation and expecting different results.