First off, I knew I could count on the wonderful readers to fill in my musical knowledge gaps--thanks everyone! I am a bit disturbed at the Lavigne/Phair thing--especially because I've been planning on picking up that album. Actually, both of those albums now that I think about it.

I'm doing the prodigal thing this upcoming week--Deeper Shade of Seoul may even have a few entries live from Beallsville. I'll be on a red-eye tomorrow night, then heading for Sunday's Steeler-Charger game, hanging out at home and in Pittsburgh for the week, and coming back to L.A. next Saturday.

I haven't talked books much lately for, well, for no particular reason. I just haven't done it. At some point I'll have to put up at least a few token comments about #s 44-46 on the Western lit list, if only because I'm trying to keep track of those things for my own future reference. Number 47, however, was a big one.

This week I finally finished the #1 entry on the Chronicle list, Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose. I've read two previous Stegner books--one history and one novel. Stegner wrote a lot of both, and they are intertwined with the same themes: the making of the U.S. West, writing history, the men whose dreams of the West outstripped reality, and the women who followed them loyally. Angle of Repose is no different.

Angle is the story of historian Lyman Ward, writing in the present (as of 1971) about his grandparents. Ward himself is retired and wheelchair-bound and writing this story largely to keep himself busy and prove his continued competence to his son and perhaps to himself. Ward is tormented by Berkeley--his sociologist son as well as his unlikely undergraduate research assistant and verbal sparring partner.

Mostly, however, we follow the grandparents--Oliver and Susan Burling Ward--through years of trials and tribulations, and specifically through Susan's extensive correspondence. Susan was the epitome of a proper Victorian lady, dropped into unlikely circumstances when she falls for a young mining engineer. She holds out hope that he will eventually get a job back in the civilized east, but of course we know from the start that that will never happen. One of Ward's--and Stegner's--main points is to show how the West was built not just by hard-scrabble pioneers, but by corporations, labor, speculators, immigrants, and even some unlikely Victorian civilizers.

The Wards' ongoing Western struggles were familiar territory for me after having read Stegner's much early book Big Rock Candy Mountain. As a pure novel, I probably preferred Big Rock. For anyone with a real historical interest, however, Angle of Repose has a lot of interesting things to say about how history is and should be written. It also contains some interesting critique of '60s radicalism from someone who is basically sympathetic to left-wing causes, but unwilling to shrug off the structures and restraints of civilization.

In short, Stegner writes big, worthwhile books that are time-consuming but very rewarding, especially if you're interested in any of the issues and questions mentioned here.

Three books to go to reach my goal of 50, and then I might be looking for some new ideas...