I'm easing up on the politics for a bit. I'm going to try to make more frequent, but far less detailed blog entries. For example:

Recently, an old friend asked me for some book recommendations. He reads a lot of current events and political books, but wants a change a pace because those genres have been making him angry lately.

So how about some books that don't evoke anger? I put together for him a list of books that made me laugh out loud:

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (my favorite book of all time; hilarious; read the book and then go to Canal Street in New Orleans to see the statue of Ignatius J. Reilly; my damn cat is named after the protagonist of this book.)

The Great American Novel by Philip Roth (The Bad News Bears meet Joe McCarthy...what could be better? Also very funny so don't dismiss if baseball makes you roll your eyes.)

The Roaches Have No King by Daniel Evan Weiss (a bug's eye view of human behavior; funny and very ironic; a lot of it makes you wince or gag, but in a...you know...good way.)

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (if you haven't read it, now's the time, especially, because we're a nation "at war".)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (ditto for this classic; try your best to remove Jack Nicholson from your imagination because Randall McMurphy's more like Kesey in build, countenance, and demeanor)

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (a play that you can read in one night, and you'll howl through the whole thing)


Of course, I can't take my own medicine. I recently finished Lies My Teachers Told Me and the Christopher Hitchens polemic, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and I'm about done with another Hitchens critique, Why Orwell Matters. I think I'm moving on to Orwell's 1984 next. I haven't read it in its entirety yet.