What I'm reading right now is Dan Simmons' The Terror, the 2006 Best American Stories anthology, and Lynda Barry's 100 Demons.

Walker Percy Remembered stressed, more than anything I've read in recent memory, the tremendous isolation and small-c catholicism of some of my favorite writers: Percy emerges as a polite, interested, ethical, and highly reticent human being. There are also heartbreaking moments marking Percy's death, of which this small section jumped out:

...[Percy] asked, "Lee, did you get my response to your letter?" I hadn't, and he said, "Oh, I think I sent it to the wrong address. Would you try to track it down because I'd hate to write it all over again." Well, I didn't realize how sick he was, and he died a month later. He had sent it to the wrong address and I could not track it down, so I never got the letter.

A lovely portrait. You should check it out. As you should Made in Japan: terrific illustrations, the best of which are ephemera that showcase Japanese graphic designers embracing Western traditions, fashions, all sorts of things. Lots of fun.

And Absurdistan? An absolute hoot. Proof?

I absolutely refuse to sleep with one of my co-nationals. God only knows where they've been.

And buckets of Nabokovilia (to be posted, soonish, to Nabokovilia):

A typical male Russian sadness descended upon us. "Speaking on the subject of women," I said, "I fear my Bronx girl, Rouenna, may be the quarry of the emigre writer Jerry Shteynfarb."

"I remember that weasel," Alyosha-Bog said. "I saw him in New York once after he wrote that Russian Arriviste's Hand Job. He thinks he's the Jewish Nabokov."

And then:

"Die, Pasternak, die!" he was shouting.

"Hey, Bob," Jerry Stheynfarb said, "what do I do with the toaster oven?"

"Toss it!" Alyosha-Bog shouted. "The fuck I gonna use it for? I'm never eating again. Hey, look at this, guys. Fucking Ada. Take that, Nabokov! You sixteen-karat bore!"

So yes. And other books read? Stephen King's Lisey's Story (a mild disappointment: King's normally perfect pace is off, and the book's language and tone vacillates wildly between baby-talk and pedestrian--though there is a wealth of King's usual sharp observations of the world), Clifford D. Simak's City (a gem: strange, lovely, growing progressively more poetic near the end; also? it is about the gradual erasure of mankind and the equally gradual ascendancy of dogs and their robot companions--and although it's clear that the book grew out of a series of short stories, it holds together beautifully, Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source (terrific noir--as good as noir gets, with a strong sense of place (a rundown surf town)--even if an important plot element felt a little too eighties), Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (large and unwieldy and way good and way funny).