The 50 book challenge rolls on…

2. The Great American Novel by Philip Roth



One of Roth’s early funny ones, this is a raucous tall tale revolving around the 1943 season of the Ruppert Mundys, cellar dwellers of the mythical Patriot League. The hapless Mundys are forced to spend the entire season on the road as their home ballpark is converted into a military base for WWII operations. With all the able-bodied ballplayers serving their country, the Mundys are a freak show staffed with the aged and decrepit, including a one-armed outfielder and a midget pitcher. Not a gut-buster really, but it’s a goofy, politically incorrect romp through a funhouse version of baseball history. Our narrator Smitty is an eldery, quite possibly senile ex-sportswriter who scrambles the story with bits and pieces of American literature and 20th century events (the HUAC hearings collide with the Black Sox scandal, references to Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn abound). I suppose it’s a sort of early run-through for The Plot Against America, but since I haven’t read that yet, I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

3. When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin



Yes, bathroom reading counts, too. Otherwise I’m never gonna get through this thing. This is pretty much a dry well, though, as Carlin has absolutely exhausted the whole cranky old man shtick. I really couldn’t prove this is a different book than either of his two earlier efforts; he may just have rearranged the chapters and stuck a different cover on it. If you’re familiar with his routines on euphemisms and the “New Language,” well, there’s a whole shitload of that stuff here. Page after page he hammers the same note (“We used to say ‘short,’ now we say ‘vertically challenged’!, etc. etc.) until you feel like you’re trapped in an endless loop. There are a few pages worth of absurdist one-liners here and there, perfectly suited to your toilet-reading needs, but otherwise: feh.