With the news of the day so terribly bleak, I turned to the New York Times's books to watch in this month of February for a quick, tonic blast of agit prop. My goodness, though; what unexpected comedic genius in these cascading cliches -- a real gift. Thanks, Woke Ones!

The following opening lines are truly copied verbatim.

Amnesty, by Aravind Adiga (Scribner's): Ever since his refugee application was denied ...

Apartment, by Teddy Wayne (Bloomsbury): It's 1996, and Wayne's achingly lonely narrator is enrolled in Columbia's MFA program ...

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann (Random House): Two fathers, one from Israel and one form Palestine, are linked by their shared grief ...

The Cactus League, by Emily Nemens (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): This debut novel by the editor of The Paris Review...

The Decadent Society, by Ross Douthat (Avid Reader): The Times's Op-Ed columnist explains what he sees as a stagnating culture ...

In the Land of Men: A Memoir, by Adrienne Miller (Ecco): Miller sets out to detail the misogynistic, old-boy culture of print magazines in the 1990s ...

The Man in the Red Coat, by Julian Barnes (Knopf): Belle epoque Paris comes alive ...

Real Life, by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead): In Taylor's debut novel, Wallace -- a shy, African-American student at a Midwestern colleges -- feels out of place ...

Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s 50-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen (Penguin Press): After the election of President Richard Nixon and the retirement of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who oversaw a number of significant civil rights cases, the Supreme Court was destined for radical change ...

Weather, by Jenny Offill (Knopf): It's been six years since Offill's award-winning novel, Dept. of Speculation, and she returns with a story written in a similarly fragmented style...

Checkers, anyone?