For non-fiction I have two new titles: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman, a memoir by a young female preppie who ends up doing fifteen months on a years-old drug charge (she let a friend she thought was exotic and exciting talk her into doing something stupid; when the friend was caught she ratted out everybody she ever met in her entire life, as middle-class perps do).
The second is The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum which I thought was just fascinating. In the first page or so of the book it says that in France arsenic used to be nicknamed "poudre de succession" or "inheritance powder" for its usefulness in dispatching kin who tarried too long this side of the Great Beyond. The first part of the book concerns heavy metals and organic poisons, the second tells of all the ways the federal government poisoned alcohol to keep people from drinking during Prohibition. You were really playing Russian roulette to drink back then unless you could get smuggled Canadian/Cuban liquor or had access to decent 'shine.

I just finished a a thoroughly enjoyable debut novel called Through the Pale Door by Brian Ray. The Atlanta Journal Constitution said that if there were an annual Southern Gothic Fiction Award, this book would undoubtedly get it. Its narrator (first person) is an art student who takes a summer job at her dad's steel plant as a respite from her crazy mother who is a revolving door admission at the psych ward. Nevertheless there is a first-love story too, and the book is surprisingly upbeat, not at all the woe-is-me tale that kind of story often is. A strong strong recommend.