Joel gave me this book when he moved out to L.A. I found time on my reading schedule for it while we went on vacation, and I found it very entertaining.

I read Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meaney a few years back on the recommendation of some friends, and it messed with my head big time. Since then I’ve read another 3 or 4 of his books. This one is set in 1960’s Vienna and has a few classic Irving plot twists.

After reading The God of Small Things I made a solemn vow to read the Booker Prize winner every year. That was 1997, I’m just getting around to it now. This one is from 1999. A little book, it kept me interested all the way through.

Weird, wacky stuff. Brautigan is one of those writers I’d never heard of before (until I read Jessamyn), and now I wonder why. Though in the end I couldn’t finish it and returned it to the library too.

True, short stories written by Average Americans for a National Public Radio project. It got a wee bit Chicken Soupish, so I stopped reading it when the library asked me to give it back.

The son of Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary to the top of Chomolungma, gives his own version of the disastrous 1996 season on the mountain during which he served as climbing leader for the IMAX movie.

In the 1950s, the CIA trained Tibetan freedom fighters in an attempt to push China out of Tibet. As usual, it didn’t work, and I suppose we’re just lucky that there’s no been no backlash as in the many other countries the US has interfered with. Not a terribly thrilling book, it reminded me of why I used to hate history in school.

The author of Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, and many other books takes a drive on the country’s interstate highway system to take the pulse of our nation and its people.

A melancholy memoir of the author’s marriage to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease at the end of her life.

If you care at all about books, this one will make your blood boil. Libraries are discarding old newspapers in favor of crappy microfilm. Valuable documents are being lost forever.