The novelita of Pedro Páramo is a parched wail carried on the wind across the plains of Jalisco.  It is magic realism with the taste and texture of dry earth.  It is the story of the death of a farming town, told in rags and snippets through the confused whispers of ghosts.

Okay, so grammar transplants may be nowhere on the horizon and we shouldn’t worry about a black market in dismembered participle phrases, but in The Language Instinct Steven Pinker argues that Chomsky’s language organ does exist.  The idea is not that babies come pre-prepped with English or Norwegian, but that the facility to acquire language is contained in a cerebral organ coded into our DNA the same as a foot or a liver.

In three classic plays Sophocles narrates the life and death of Oedipus—wise, brave and cursed—and the fates of his unhappy sibling-children.  Every stage in the story has its own set of morals to promote, from the first awful discovery all the way to the final death of the faithful daughter Antigone, but it is the first play, Oedipus the King, which is most powerful and terrifying.

Few flics of any genre deserve the title of “instant classic”, but when you see one, you know one.  “The Men Who Stare At Goats” is an instant classic.  More than a slapstick spoof, it is a true adventure story which makes some well-researched comedic jabs at the US military.  It even lays on a layer of deep philosophy, but stops just before the mixture gets heavy.