This is a fact that feels true: Every second, publishers produce another sixteen new trivia books loosely assembled around a theme (think of the Worst Case Scenario series, for instance). Almost all of those books are basically intended to be disposable, an accrual of random information disguised as a book. They're the sorts of things you'll leave in your bathroom for a while and then toss out when they get moldy. And that's fine. But every once in a while, you come across a well-crafted example, and it makes the rest of the genre look sick. So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler's Guide to Time Travel is everything these trivia books should be: It's well-researched, it's funny, and it's interesting. Wormhole is a compendium of all the different methods of time travel you'll find in science fiction novels and movies. Does all this information need to be in one place? Of course not. Is it fun to read all the different, often contradictory, scenarios in one place? Yes it is. The authors explain paradoxes with surprisingly clear prose and they manage to shove an entire sci-fi encyclopedia into a paperback. If that sounds good to you, you'll probably enjoy this.

The President's Club is a biography of the relationships between modern presidents. Authors Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy sell the concept convincingly—nobody quite understands the loneliness and the exhilaration of being a president, they argue, except another president—and they lace the book with short, interesting anecdotes. Here's Lyndon B. Johnson, our neediest president, expressing his loyalty to Dwight Eisenhower:

...I just want you to know that as long as I'm in that office, you are in it, and there's not a privilege of it, or a power of it, or a purpose of it that you can't share. And your bedroom is up there waiting for you, and your plane is standing by your side.

The friendships between the great (and not-so-great) men is touching, and it often bridges the partisan divide. (Except for Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter kind of comes across as an asshole to every president.) Club's structure is a little unwieldy, zipping backwards and forward in time, but it's at least exhaustive, and it serves as a backhanded history of the United States from the 1950s to today. Political junkies will be in heaven.