A Confederacy of Dunces is an absolute joy. I had an enormous, goofy grin on my face the entire time. This is the funniest book I've read since The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life- it may, in fact, be the funniest book I've ever read. I kept turning to whoever was around me at the time (even strangers on the bus, like) and saying: "Oh, oh, this is a good bit, you've gotta hear this!" and ...

So I was heading off to Croatia and I realized that I knew next to nothing about the war there. I knew it had something to do with Serbia and Bosnia or Bosno-Serbi-Cromagnon or something, but really didn't have the foggiest idea what it was all about, how it started, how it ended, who was doing what to whom, and that I should really get my head `round it while I was there (so forgive me if you alr ...

"So far, so average." says the narrator about two-thirds into The Player of Games, my first foray into the highly recommended world of Iain M. Banks. "Yup." I internally nodded to myself. Maybe it was my own fault for reading outlandish sci-fi right on the heels of the immacuately-constructed worlds of Infinite Jest and Post Captain. Maybe nothing could live up to those two giants of awesomeness. ...

How much do I love the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brien? If you're not familiar with them, the film Master & Commander was based on book ten (The Far Side of the World) of a twenty-book cycle that follows the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey, a brutish by good hearted sailor in the royal navy, and his friend Stephen Maturin, who is variously a surgeon for Jack's vessels and a spy for Bri ...

Infinite Jest is huge. That's the first thing you need to know. If you are the sort of person who goes to sleep with a book balanced on their chest and wakes up when it falls on their nose, Infinite Jest will fall over and give you a black eye. That's how big she is. We're talking War & Peace, here. To give you an idea of how big this book is, there's upwards of 300 footnotes, most of which ar ...