Whatcha readin?

[Jeffrey Meikle]

I'm glad to see so many foax reading JR, which rivals GR as my all-time
fave.  JR comes chillingly close to predicting the Reagan/Gingrich era,
with its individualist greed divorced from any social connection, endlessly
expanding pyramid schemes, toadying managerial types, bottom-line
reductionisms, and above all, the subtle and on-going decay of the language
as soulless jargons and euphemisms prevail, and no one is any longer
capable of completing a sentence.

Anyway, I'm reading James Ellroy's "American Tabloid," a hilarious send-up
of the mob/Cuban/Kennedy story, presumably to end in Dallas; just finished
James Kelman's "How Late It Was, How Late," a movingly lyrical terminally
gritty stream-of-consciousness tale of a working-class loser in Glasgow,
which rivals Faulkner for style and echoes the ambiguity of the ending of
Melville's "Confidence Man" (and, by the way, for my money, is the best
Scots novel going, comparing to "Trainspotting" as TRP does to Tom
Robbins); and I spent a couple of months falling asleep every night to the
Kyrgyz epic poem "Manas," recommended only to those with a fanatical
interest in that part of the world.

Cheers,
Jeff