I read Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs and liked it, but I thought her short stories were better -- Birds of America. Barbara Kingsolver is awesome, and I'll toss out another name -- Sandra Cisneros. Her Caramelo is terrific, about a Mexican family that spends part of each year in Chicago. Reminded me a little bit of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. Louise Erdrich is very good also -- her Plague of Doves is a great read but is pretty dark.

It is more of a play than a book, but I finished reading Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. I'm currently reading Fasting by Jentezen Franklin. I want to read Tale of Two Cities again, so I'm planning on buying that this weekend.

I'm posting this here because we have no separate thread for newspapers--which for me is sad, but understandable. After 34 years, Cathy Guisewite brought her comic strip Cathy to a close on October 3.

I finished reading Stealing Athena, which would have been a lot more entertaining if I had known all of the events were real. Can't remember the author's name, because I took it down to the basement to the table where we all swap books. Right now for my fic I'm plowing through A Guide to Physical Examination by Barbara Bates, MD. Yes, we happened to have it on our crammed bookshelves.