The buzz book right now is Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. It's not bad—it certainly doesn't deserve the "Nabokovian" hyperbole that the New York Times Book Review piled on—but the author goes out of her way to prove how smart she is. It's a novel that cites its own sources, and it made me want to tell Ms. Pessl—the very name suggests the miscegenation of "special" and "precious"—to calm down already, we're sure you're very smart.

Janna Levin is probably more quantifiably intelligent than Ms. Pessl. She's an astrophysicist who's authored a very good layman-ready science book, How the Universe Got Its Spots. Her debut novel, which graphs the not-quite-parallel, not-quite-perpendicular lives of Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, isn't as artfully written as some, but it has compassion for its brittle subjects—Gödel starved himself to death and Turing poisoned himself in a most Disneyphilic manner. The prose is not entirely elegant, but it's charged with more than enough poetry, inspired by both the pursuit of reason and the sorrowful tragedies of the 20th century's many scientific martyrs. A strikingly intelligent book, it's also smart enough to aim first for the heart. PAUL CONSTANT