The latest little books

I finished off the Montesquieu {Persian Lettres}in Santa Marta, so I thought. The monarch in those times-as observed by the Turkish travellers and their inerlocutors-was quarelling with the lords and the hired foreign finance minister; and paper 'securities' turned merchants into beggers and vice versa. I would have forgotten the whole convoluted episode were it not for the collossal collapse of the NY financial securities industry. Suddenly, Montesquieu is proven again as among the keenest of societal observers.

I just finished an advance copy of a light piece on a madman who reads the OED straight through, as well. I think there's at least a part of a story incipient in the dissonance between the 'hip' colloquial possibilities provided by the gems and germs of vocabulary that he brings from the depths of the voluminous undertaking, and his own sometimes dreamy, unselfconscious interludes where he chronicles the minutae of a self-inflicted privledge. That I was delighted and fascinated by the book perhaps biases my critical eye, though not so much as to prevent me from categorizing Mr. Shea's work as an off-shoot of the current 'stunt-book' genre. That is not to belittle it, because I'm hoping it does stupendous sales and that I can rip off its most salient points.