What I'm reading right now is Dombey and Son--about 200 pages into it and I'm just in a daze of joy (Dickens writes thick: everything's happening all at once and all his characters jump and cough and wheeze--their skin is alive but so is everything else about them, they're as animated as one can hope for--as do the locales. Everything bristles with life.)

One Nation Under Goods does contain some good insights, but the book lacks substance: there's just too many blanket assertions as well as too much reliance on other, sharper sources (such as Paco Underhill's The Science of Shopping). What's worse, perhaps, are the frequent, unsuccessful, and often pun- or wordplay-dependent patches of prose that pass for concluding thoughts near the end of nearly every chapter.

I just finished Susan Hubbard's The Society of S, which proved terrific, engrossing, dry, and funny. There were two monkeys, a few vampires, some terrific sendups of various kinds of questionable taste, some lovely (and sharp-eyed) descriptions of Florida, one hurricane, some synesthesia, a compact and way cool sense of what's good and beautiful in the world--a tidy and serene worldview--plus a terrific Nabokovilian moment:

He warned me that it would be a long story, one that took time to tell. He asked me to be patient, not to interrupt with questions. "I want you to understand how things ensued, how one thing caused another," he said. "As Nabokov wrote in his memoir, 'Let me look at my demon objectively.'" [Then, later in the same page:]"An odd coincidence," he said. "Yes, we'd met when we were children. My aunt lived in Georgia. I met your mother one summer afternoon on Tybee Island, and we played in the sand together. I was six. She was ten. I was a child, and she was a child."
I recognized the line from "Annabel Lee."