What I'm reading right now is Michael Connelly's Angels Flight.

Finished Nickel and Dimed, which was wonderful: the author's experience in the land of low-wage income-earners is funny and harrowing, and moreover you get footnotes like the one below.

⁶ I thank Sona Pai, an Indian American graduate student in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon, for giving me a glimpse into the Indian American motel-operating community and the lives of immigrant brides.

N&D'd footnote, page 161.

Angel word: Adjutant (p. 1), AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems, I think -- see here) (p. 42).

What I'm reading right now is Barbara Eherenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.

5-cent word: soteriological (p. 68).

Finished Chekhov's Later Short Stories, 1888-1903, which I called "dry and humane" for some reason: They are far from dry: They're dark and funny and sad and brimming with life, and the best of them are wise and funny in places where wisdom or wit are not expected.

In between scanning the news I have been reading Anton Chekhov's dry and humane Later Short Stories, 1888-1903. They're very good.

So ja, finished The Mouse that Roared. It was well researched but poorly written. Interesting, at any rate.

What I'm reading right now is Henry A. Giroux's The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. So far Giroux has talked about the gap between what Disney stands for (wholesomeness, innocence) and what it does (make money at all costs), and about the corporation's, any corporation's, main goal, which is to create and foster and encourage consumers (and also why Disney is so good at it: partly because what is being sold is so bland -- relatively undramatic and morally simple -- and partly because it almost manages to mascarade the sale). So far the book's biggest hindrance is Giroux's academese -- far too many refs. to "public discourse" and "public sphere" -- but it's good and balanced and worth reading. (Though it's nowhere near as fun as Hiassen's Team Rodent.)

Giroux on some of what Disney has done right:

But Disney's attempt to turn children into consumers and to make commodification a defining principle of children's culture should not suggest a parallel vulgarity in its aesthetic experiments with popular forms of entertainment. Disney has shown enormous inventiveness in its attempts to reconstruct the very grounds on which popular culture is defined and shaped. ...By combining high and low culture, Disney opened up new cultural possibilities for artists and audiences alike.

And on what Disney has done wrong:

Far from being a model of moral leadership and social responsibility, Disney monopolizes media power, limits the free flow of information, and undermines substantive public debate. Disney poses a serious threat to democracy by corporatizing public space and by limiting the avenues of public expression and choice.

Finished Sam the Cat. Klam's stories are tight and gleefully nasty. Their narrators are unwholesome, unpleasant, mean, and selfish -- they're self-absorbed liars. So ja: a really cool book about seriously unpleasant (though almost likable) people.

What I'm reading right now is Matthew Klam's Sam the Cat and Other Stories.

Finished The World Jones Made, which is a fun and sophisticated novel about the many (dangerous) attractions of totalitarianism -- it's relatively early PKD, and it gets clunky sometimes, but for the most part it's very good and dark and strange.

From The World Jones Made (p: 80):

Tyler examined the bill-of-fare with interest, and finally chose a liqueur built around the drug artemisia

Aka wormwood. So the liqueur is probably absinthe -- see here and here.

What I'm reading right now is Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made.

Finished The Culture of Fear. This book is a breath of fresh air -- all it says is that the bulk of media attention has focused on statistically insignificant problems (such as air disasters and school shootings) or nonexistent problems (such crack babies (don't exist) and single moms (not the scourge of civilization)) as ways for the public to avoid dealing with real, prosaic problems whose solutions are far more complicated (such as the widening gap between the rich and the poor). So ja, terrific book: evenhanded (liberals and conservatives get blasted more or less equally), funny, and full of revealing statistics (crime, specially crime committed by juveniles, is down -- teenage pregnancy is far lower than what it was in the 50s), and w/ clear-eyed assesments of how these fears are created (pseudo-experts, anecdotal evidence, self-feeding loops).

What I'm reading right now is Glassner's excellent (so far) The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

Finished Boyd's Nabokov's Pale Fire -- the first half of the book is amazing: it has to be the best close reading anyone has ever done of Pale Fire, and it's certainly the best analysis of any text I've ever encountered. The second half is puzzling, and there seemed to be bits that did not connect at all, though even so it's very provocative and interesting.