The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O’Neil with Stephen Baker (Crown).

An ingenious, at once enraging and entertaining, pop-sociological screed against, not shame, an appropriate emotion in its place, but shaming, moral snootiness, as an all-too-prevalent component of our political rhetoric. O’Neil is witty, but clearly serious, and smart. There happens to be a passage in this book that reports on a public hassle over placing homeless people in a nice residential hotel in a respectable neighborhood in Manhattan that I had close (but not inside) knowledge of—that was my nabe, on a corner that I walked past daily—and she pretty certainly gets all sides of that right.

Shadows Reel by C. J. Box (Putnam).

A Joe Pickett crime novel—near the top of bestseller lists already, so needing just an announcement, really. I could mention a touch of pretty sharp-edged contemporary politics talk that occurs (is that a regular thing in this series, that I’ve missed in skim-reading earlier novels?). A small exchange, just chit-chat, not plot relevant; not actively offensive to anybody on any side, and obviously true to present-day life: the subject does come up among smart, alert people (even in Wyoming, I remind my provincial East coast self). But if you’re tetchy on that general subject… “Does it have to be everywhere?” occurred to me in a sort of silent whine.

Into Every Generation a Slayer is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts by Evan Ross Katz (Hachette).

Surely to be picked up mostly by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fans; but this is very revealing, both rich and lively, about how one popular art form, serial TV drama, might be conceived and created and run, and how it might insist on evolving from year to year when smart and serious people are making it. In spite of its dopey subtitle, it’s for grownups (for one thing, a bit of ugly stuff needs to be covered, and is, with both candor and compassion). What it isn’t is a book of fan gushing—not quite none, but almost (I was a fan, so I didn’t mind what little there is). What it is, is a thoughtful “how certain unique and interesting work gets done” book. Not the column’s first.

The Great Passion by James Runcie (Bloomsbury).

A really gorgeous, actually inspiring historical novel of a dramatic passage in the life of J. S. Bach, as experienced by a boy taken on as an assistant by Bach as he’s creating his immortal St. Matthew Passion. Fiction, but carefully rooted in musical history and Bach’s personality—more than in his life story, because centered on just that year or so (though there are flashbacks). Everybody here is made real, Bach as a family man as well as an artist, and nothing clashes with, and all enriches, what one already knows of him in a general way.