Currently Reading - October 15, 2009

I finished Dagoberto Gilb's The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna last night. Having checked out a few other reviews of it (and it was generally very well received), I would agree with some of the comments I read, and am somewhat unsure as to exactly what I thought of the book. It was a quick read, and a comment that did resonate with me was that it was book about nothing in the same way that Seinfeld was a TV show about nothing. I think I would agree with this. There were a number of entertaining oddball characters, and the writing was good, but nothing much happened. So while I certainly didn't dislike the book, I don't know that I could say that I liked it a whole lot either, or at least enough to say that it was measurably above average. In a strange way, I think the impression I was left with was that I liked the author without particularly liking the book. I would be interested to read his short story collection, which was a PEN/Faulkner finalist, The Magic of Blood.

This would count as book #2 out of 4 for my "new authors" goal.

I'm not sure what to start next. Candidates include Roth's The Humbling and Ron Hansen's Isn't It Romantic? Both are short and are probably only a couple of days reading. Wait, I take that back. Phillies-Dodgers NLCS starts tonight so not much reading will get done. Go Phils!