Whew. I *finally* finished Don DeLillo's _Underworld_, a book I bought way back in September 1997 and just couldn't put down for the first couple of paragraphs or so. After that, down is pretty much where it stayed, all 827 pages of stream-of-consciousness descriptive rambling. Okay, that's more harsh than I need to be, I'll admit. After all, DeLillo voluntarily declines to subscribe to traditional styles of novel writing. He majors on description, trying to capture the mindset of our age in scenes and musings that are often true and beautiful in a way. There's no doubt that the author has a faculty with language and expression, and it's possible, at times, to get absorbed into the postmodern, nuclear, information age of America that DeLillo presents. But his style is also such that you can set aside the book for five or six months, and not be bothered by the fact that you can't recall certain plot elements. There *are* no plot elements the exclusion of which would prevent your being able to figure out what's being said, if you can do so at all. Read _Underworld_ only if you're already a DeLillo fan, or if you can handle a book with very little plot but lots of expression and close consideration of the evolution of present-day American society.

Far better, and recommended for almost everyone with a taste for literature, is a book I've just re-read for the second time: _All The King's Men_ by Robert Penn Warren. This one's got a plot, thankfully, and Warren masterfully delves into his characters, especially the narrator. I can't think of a single serious flaw in _All The King's Men_, although of course I'm heavily biased in its favor. It is one of those books that leaves me feeling utterly spent by the final page, exhausted in my thoughts, beliefs and feelings. Not that it is sap-filled or a tear-jerker, but the story is deep and truthful and satisfying, and edged with humor at many points. Read it.

I had paused partway through _All The King's Men_ to read through the last three books of Orson Scott Card's "Ender" cycle: _Speaker For The Dead_, _Xenocide_, and _Children Of The Mind_. Of these, _Speaker_ seemed the best to me, keeping my interest up more or less as successfully as did _Ender's Game_, the first book in the series. The third and fourth entires in the series were by no means bad, and I'd recommend them to anyone who has already read _Ender's Game_ and _Speaker_. But I had the BAM'ed version of those last two books going through my head as I read them (thanks a lot, Sam and Dave :-) ), and I have to admit that it becomes tiring to constantly review every character's inner torment over the delicate decisions that might save or destroy entire species of sentient life. Plus, Card's introduction of the idea of "Aiua" (sp?), spaceless entities somewhat like souls that enter real space from outside it and unite with each particle and living being in real space, got to be hard to swallow, and fell into place too neatly as the discovery that would handily solve all the problems in the story. But again, not bad reading overall.

Finally, before plunging into the "Ender" series, I had spent a weekend on Margaret Weis' novel _The Soulforge_, which I discovered quite by accident. It focuses on the early life of the famous Dragonlance character Raistlin Majere, and is a pretty good read, although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already familiar with the main characters from the "Chronicles" and "Legends" series of Dragonlance books. I like the character of Raistlin already, and enjoyed the fuller treatment that Weis gives to his formative years than what has appeared in various short stories so far.

That's it for now. I'm still stuck in the middle of _The Two Towers_, where everyone always gets stuck in LoTR, but I'll pick it back up and finish sometime in the forseeable future. Right now, with _All The King's Men_ still fresh in my mind, I've got more of a taste for traditional literature, and have started re-reading Carson McCullers' _The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter_. Anyone out there have recommendations along those lines?

Iss "lemme just finish this chapter first, okay sweetie?" achar