What I'm reading right now is Franz Kafka's Amerika.

Chateaubriand was a hoot. Corny, laden with cheese, with the noblest savages south of James Fenimore Cooper. For all that, the two novels are well worth reading--strange, true works of art, and buckets of fun--there are some genuinely wonderful, over-the-top moments (sad young man contemplating the infinite by the lip of an active volcano), as well as a weird obsession with incest--in René, the lovers were raised by the same father-figure, and refer to each other as brother and sister, and in Atala, they really are brother and sister, so no wonder Nabokov makes a note of it in Ada. More shocking than anything, perhaps, is Chateaubriand's pessimism:

Believe, my son, sorrows are not eternal. Sooner or later they must come to an end, because the heart of man is finite--this is one of our great miseries. We cannot even be unhappy for long.

I also read Marcelo Birmajer's spare, mostly satisfying No Tan Distinto, whose exploration of Jewish life and the afterlife as a kind of muted resort full of the ordinary is okay. The book takes on greater weight nearer the end, with the Isaac Bashevis Singer motto gaining resonance, but the book could have done more, it seems.