In today’s job market, many of us are probably rethinking our career goals. Prostitution may or may not have occurred to you as an option, but we’d be lying if we said it hadn’t occurred to us. These days, you can see a highly debated version of the high class prostitute lifestyle, one very different from Julia Roberts’ fairy tale, on Showtime’s series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, starring Billy Piper, which is based on the true-life confessions of Belle de Jour, a call girl-turned-writer in London. Although Belle’s actual identity is kept secret, London’s most (in)famous call girl agreed to chat with The Sun about prostitution, her university days and how she would have made Twilight differently.

Love triangles, revenge, mental illness, morality, Cornell — Sara Gruen’s novel Water for Elephants simply has it all. I’m not quite sure what originally attracted me to this book for I am not, by any means, a fan of the circus. In fact, I’m actually very much averse to the circus, to be frank; too many freaks with haphazard body parts and Bradbury-like machinery twisting one’s mind. However, once I decided to set aside my negative biases and flipped open the first page, I was hooked.

Being a university student in upstate New York can be an emotional experience, triggering binge drinking and even nervous breakdowns.

This is not a personal confession, but a truth confirmed by Charles Baxter’s newest novel, The Soul Thief. The protagonist, Nathaniel Mason, spends his first few months as a graduate student in Buffalo making new acquaintances, struggling with romantic relationships and attempting to make sense of his own identity. Baxter’s descriptive prose perfectly evokes the ambiguities of daily life and the complexity of individual personalities.

With chapter titles from “Grillin’ Like a Villain” to “How Sweet It Ends,” George Duran’s unique cookbook sets out to take comfort food to a new, decidedly unexpected level. While the recipes may not make for the most appetizing sounding dishes (potato chip Spanish tortillas?), the book is, overall, well written and interesting.

Duran explains right off the bat his penchant for fried foods, and even goes so far as to list some of his favorites: fried pickles, fried strawberries, fried olives, etc. As Duran himself writes, “You can fry all of these things. The question is, should you?” In my opinion, you should not, so the enormous amount of fried food in the cookbook was a bit off-putting. Once past the initial grease, however, there are delicious recipes to be found.

Combine science fiction with romance and you have Stephanie Meyer’s first adult fiction novel. The Host focuses on what it means to be human in the wake of a foreign invasion.

We’ve all heard the cries of the conspiracy theorists who believe that the Earth is under attack and people are being abducted. This novel explores what would happen if those conspiracy nuts were right all along. This isn’t just another extraterrestrial sci-fi conundrum — we see the story through the eyes of one of the aliens, forcing a perhaps unwanted sympathy. By constructing such a point of view, Meyer turns the violence and animalistic nature of humans into a dualistic package.

Gripping their freshly printed booklists, returning and first-year students frantically run through the shelves of the Cornell Store each semester. Anxious and ready to tackle a new set of classes, students flood tiny red shopping carts with books and study materials. After glancing at the yellow tab of class readings, many are surprised to find that the professors teaching their classes and the authors of the required books share the same name.

All professors who write books make royalties from the books they sell to their students. It is what they do with these royalties that has sparked debate in academic circles: Is it unethical for professors to keep the money earned from the books they assign to their own students?