[NewChief]

Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. It's cool so far.

Finally finished the Little Friend by Donna Tartt, which was a huge dissapointment to me after the Secret History, which I loved. The Little Friend seemed to be way too much east coast intellectual trying to explore and 'honor' Southern tradition. She's no Flannery O'Connor, that's for sure.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson was before that, and it was excellent. Also very interesting in light of the recent "wire tapping" brouhaha. It will give you a unique insight into data mining and the way pattern analysis works.

Picked up Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, due to his ubiquitousness in that best American novels of the last 25 years. I'm underimpressed. Maybe I'm just not east coast Jewish enough, but the novel was just... irritating. I've got 3 Roth novels checked out, so I'm hoping one of the others hooks me a little better. That's about it for me on the literary front.