What I'm Reading: The War Against Cliche : Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis, and it's excellent. Actually, I've had it for awhile -- I have a nice little tidy collection of unread Amis books, in fact -- it's on the shelf next to the computer and several times I've taken it out and read the odd piece whilst waiting for some site or another to load. (That's how we do it in dial-up land.) Sometime last night I glanced at it and decided to give it a go in earnest, straight-through, and I'm finding it addictive. Amis writes essays the way they were meant to be, as a way of just kind of letting his deeply literary, scrupulously articulate and admirably skeptical intelligence go wandering.

And this way I'll finally force myself to actually read his essay on Augie March instead of just bellowing about how absurd it is.