We’ve got a clear mission here at Wordcandy: we promote fun, smart, critically ignored popular fiction. We beam a little love at the best romance novels, mysteries, fantasy/sci-fi stories, manga, and YA titles the world has to offer. Sometimes, however, we get a book in the mail that’s a little different, and these titles all-too-frequently end up languishing in the darkest recesses of our “To Be Read” pile. These are totally Wordcandy-worthy books—we’re just not sure what to do with them.

This week we’re cleaning off our desks, and that means we’ll be trotting out reviews from all over the genre map: two poetry collections, a book about extreme Tokyo fashion, a manga-style kids’ story about anthropomorphic baby mice, a serialized audio novel written by some of the nation’s top thriller authors, an autobiography about growing up in Kiev, a book about dinosaurs, a collection of profanity-laced essays about the joy of teaching, and a novel about Winston Churchill. We’re not sure what we’ll put here on the blog* and what we’ll stick on the main site, but both sites are going to be chock-full of some very offbeat (well, by our standards) material.

*But don’t worry, blog fans—if we run across any critical Wordcandy news stories, like Rowling announcing an eighth Harry Potter book or Britney reading another C.S. Lewis novel, we’ll report that, too.