The latest installment of my book review column, STRONG MEDICINE: Books That Cures What Ails You, has just been published at Intergalactic Medicine Show.

In this column, I review three first novels: Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora; Nick DiChario’s A Small and Remarkable Life; and David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake.

[Excerpt:] Imagine you could do to your body what you can do to a browser like Firefox–you can install plug-ins to make it do a variety of tasks that you (but not everyone) would find useful, and if there’s something about the standard operating procedures that irritates you, you can just go in and tweak the code to make the offending annoyance stop. Tired? Don’t down caffeine; just run a program to wake you up. Need to tell something private to your friend while in a room full of people? Don’t leave the room; just use the ConfidentialWhisper program, which is essentially technological telepathy.

Go read the review and then come back and tell me how awesome it is.