Housecleaning

In the interest of keeping house leading into the new year, I am just noting for posterity's sake the other books I've been reading this fall. They're all worthy of discussion in their own ways; for this post, suffice it to say that the first two have been integral to a fiction project I'm working on, and the other two are written by guys who are my inspirations, my gurus, and the worst possible influences on me as a writer -- particularly ol' Tom, as he makes me envy his prose so much that I inevitably attempt to emulate it. (At least Kurt can be a non-Hemingway model of concise, compact, direct writing.)

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989, by Frederick Taylor

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins

Look at the Birdie, by Kurt Vonnegut