The reading list is starting to feel like an anchor and I'm deviating more from it, so I decided to try to work on my goal of 50 out of the 100 by picking off some of the shortest books on the list. Leonard Gardner's Fat City is a book about two boxers, one 18 and the other 30, each trying to make a go of it on the local circuit. Tully is a has-been and Ernie is a never-was, and these two Stockton, Californians both get fairly pummeled for their efforts--in the ring and out. Both also end up at various points doing agricultural day labor in the Central Valley. This is a grim social realist tale--strongly written but not high on the entertainment scale.

The same can be said for Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays. This novella is one of those first-person accounts (mostly--the perspective shifts a bit here) of someone in a deep funk. This is never fun, though it can produce some good literature. In this case the person is a low-level actress who starred in two of her director husband's films--one a minor hit and the other never released. She has a low level of fame but struggles to get more work; more importantly, though, her marriage is falling apart, she does not respond well to an on-the-sly abortion (it's 1970), and she is haunted by her parents' memory. Like The Bell Jar or Prozac Nation, this boils down to the story of someone so depressed that they pretty much cease to function. If you've read either of the others, don't bother with this one. If you haven't and want to try one, this has the virtue of being really short. The others have the virtue of being better.

Finally, my "right before bed" reading the last few weeks has been a book I bought as a trash prize, but which I had to check out myself. The Serial is a quasi-soap opera set in Marin County in the 1970s, or rather it's a satire of one. Or maybe it isn't a satire. I'm not sure. The humor comes from watching people try their damnedest to be trendy in any possible way--food, clothes, bars, lifestlyes, religion, sex, etc.--and in watching the ridiculousness abound. The funniest parts for me involved a minor character--a 10-year-old (who "still has time to get in touch with his inner child") whose parents are into allowing his full self-actualization, but mostly he just likes to hit, destroy, and kill things. It was a total diversionary guilty pleasure, and while it wasn't as good as I'd hoped, it sufficed.