I'm back in the states, and doing a little light summer reading.

Hey all,

Back in these here contiguous 48, and I'm doing a little light summer reading. So far: Harukai Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, Tracy Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains, and then A Crazy Book I Never Thought I'd Read (more in a sec).

God. Damn, I missed reading in English.

Okay, so on to the book I never thought I'd read:

I first came across this article (READ that article!) when it was published in 2004. It amazed and astounded me, and I went out searching for the book it mentions. After a lot of digging, the Ohio State Interlibrary Loan system managed to get me access to an original copy for all of seven days, but alas, I didn't have any time to actually read it.

Something caught my memory a few days ago, and so I looked at the Internet Archive (and their sister site, the Open Library, which has a way better system for reading than Google Books), and lo and behold, here it is.

Read the article first, and if you dare, download and read the book. It's the most fantastic science-fiction / humor/ post-modern / novel to be written in 1886, just after the civil war in the south.

But don't take MY word for it (thank you, Levar Burton) ...