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.

What I'm reading right now is Chateaubriand's Atala / Rene.

Paul Rand's thoughts on design were spare, but effective and true, though I'm 50/50 on Rand's designs themselves: some are breathtaking in their simplicity, impact, and beauty. Others are just sort of ugly. Also read Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, which is wonderful.

What I'm reading right now is Paul Rand: A Designer's Art.

Amphigorey was a welcome dose of genial morbidity.

What I'm reading right now is Edward Gorey's Amphigorey.

The Secret Parts of Fortune is mammoth, and a treasure, and not to be missed--fascinating journalistic pieces on obssessives, obssessions, strange goings-on, and the stranger-still activities of those investigating the strange goings-on. Plus a passionate plea for the superiority of cats. Plus the unprintable satanic photograph of Long Island. Skull and Bones. Hitler. Watergate. All funny & well researched & true & worth your while.

As is John Stilgoe's Outside Lies Magic, which turns what we think of ordinary landscapes as places full of hidden information. I don't want to give too much away--it's a very brief book & lucid and will change how you look at the world, from interstate "clusters" (fast-food joint/gas/lodging) to, well, pretty much everything. (Like many, I was startled into look up Stilgoe by this 60 Minutes story, and mostly by the Harvard professor's example of the FedEx logo, with its arrow embedded in the negative space between the E and the x. It had never dawned on me that anything so familiar could hide information. But of course it wasn't quite hiding. I just was not looking. And I wasn't looking b/c no one had told me to look. Which is the problem, says Stilgoe. We don't take the time to really look, to think, to explore.)