I've been seriously neglecting my book reviewing duties, so here goes:

• James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia. I enjoyed this much more than the previous Ellroy I read, which was White Jazz. I suspect I may eventually work my way through all his books; I've already picked up The Big Nowhere, and L.A. Confidential is on The List. Dahlia was better than Jazz because it didn't get to the ridiculously serpentine level that made the latter so frustrating that I felt I should be taking notes. I like the whole hard-boiled L.A. detective genre, and of course it's always fun recognizing place names and whatnot.
  
• Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They?. The movie version is arguably one of my three favorite films, period (along with A Fish Called Wanda and Pulp Fiction, though I'm probably forgetting something). The book ain't chopped liver, but at about 100 pages it's just enough to whet your appetite without being totally satisfactory. If you have to choose, watch the movie--even though it might actually take more time. This is the story of a Depression Era dance marathon that takes the downtrodden and breaks them down even further. This movie will teach you in two hours why social historians spend years studying popular culture. The book's OK; McCoy is a second-tier author of hard-boiled '30s and '40s fiction and I'll probably pick him up again, but after seeing the movie it's a complete afterthought.
  
• Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre. Subtitled "And Other Episodes in French Cultural History", this book is mildly notorious in my mind for very history grad student-specific reasons. If you look at the footnotes of any sociocultural American history written (by an actual academic--I never count the stuff you'd find in Waldenbooks) in the last 15 years or so, there are 3 European history books you'll always find in the footnotes. This is one, and I laughed out loud when I saw that amazon.com's first two "Customers who bought this book also bought:" suggestions are the other two. These books are allegedly in the footnotes as methodological inspiration, but they're actually there so that the author can point to them when accused of being a parochial Americanist who never reads outside his/her own field. What else do these books have in common? They're relatively short and they're playful--and, to be fair, they do provide some methodological guidance in researching popular culture in the literal sense of the culture of the populus, especially in pre-modern times.
  The actual essays in this book seem to be arranged in order from most to least interesting to the general reader. The first essay is a fascinating look at the difference between French, German, and English fairy tales; anyone who grew up on Mother Goose will find parts of this very cool, parts of it very disturbing, and most of those to be the same parts. The second, titular essay asks why 18th-century workers in a print shop found the murder of several cats (including their boss's) and its dramatic reenactment to be uproariously funny. The methodological premise is a good one--if you don't get the joke from a pervious culture, trying to figure out why the joke was funny there and then is a good window into understanding the culture. However, the essay becomes one of those tedious efforts to find worker resistance in every little act dating back millenia. It's downhill from there--essays on the Encyclopedia and on one voracious reader of Rousseau are of little interest to anyone who doesn't study pre-Revolutionary France. I heartily recommend the fairy tale essay, and some may enjoy the cats; the rest should remain relegated to the footnotes of history (books).
  
• Robert Olen Butler's Tabloid Dreams. I received this as a wedding favor at Bill and Terri's nuptials back in October, and I finally got around to reading it on the New York trip. This is a short story collection with the story ideas and titles taken from supermarket tabloid headlines. This is hit or miss--the stories about the nine-year-old hit man, the Titanic survivor reincarnated inside a waterbed, and the woman with the alien lover stand out as moving well past the premise and into interesting ground of their own right. Many of the others seem like real stretches to fit the theme, particularly the other Titanic story, which doesn't even really fit with its own title. I haven't reading Butler's Pulitzer-winning A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, but if you're going to pick him up, I'd start there rather than here.
  

OK, that should catch us up--hopefully back to general interest blog mode, minus the depressing stuff, next time.