I finished “The Road” a while back. Now I’m just aimlessly reading parts of a book until I find a new book. Does anyone have any suggestions? Here are my requirements:
What constitutes modern American lit, exactly?
P.G. Wodehouse spent his later years in the US, writing on into the last half of the 20th century. He’s funny, too, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. Any of the Jeeves stories are priceless. Look for an anthology of them.
It’s not American, but for light and very funny, I’ve gotta go with
Roddy Doyle’s “Barrytown Trilogy”. (I’m talkin’ LOL funny here)
As for American, and I warn you it’s not new, but is funny,
“Taps for Private Tussie” by Jessee Stuart
If you want something New and Exciting and related to Irish Music, check out Bay Area Musician Danny Carnahan’s new mystery “A Jig before Dying” - just out!
see http://www.dannycarnahan.com/writing/novel_jig.html
Synopsis from his website: "Back home in San Francisco after a year in Dublin, computer engineer Niall Sweeney enjoys a pleasant routine working in a bank and fiddling at night in an Irish bar. Suddenly, he is the target of a vicious and insane bar-room assault at the hands of a near-stranger. But Sweeney’s troubles really begin when he discovers the mutilated body of his attacker outside, opened like a can of sardines.
Horrifying coincidences crash down on Sweeney. Baffled, he is fingered by the police as the link connecting the murder with a complex IRA banking scam and a deadly London bombing. With the help of his wife Rose, a brilliant college literature professor, Sweeney tries to keep one step ahead of both the police and a malevolent shadowy stranger while searching desperately for the truth.
While Sweeney hunts among the bar musicians for the murderer, discovering only smoldering fear, secret affairs and a bartender who is far from what he seems to be, Rose launches off in another, seemingly crazy direction, convinced that the secret can be found in the murdered man’s obsession with a haunting thousand-year-old Irish poem—The Legend of Mad Sweeney.
Rose learns, to her horror, that by revealing the strange solution to the mystery she would destroy the lives of half a dozen innocent people. The final decision about what to do is made for her by the sinister shadow man in a terrifying and deadly climax. But to save her husband, Rose must give the police a solution to the murder that is as believable as it is completely wrong."
Enjoy!
Casey
How about McCarthy’s Blood Meridian?
For light bedtime reading James Rollins is pretty good. Fast paced adventure.
If you want help getting to sleep you could try the Cisco certification manual.
My recommendation is for youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne. I read it several years ago, and remember it being really funny. It’s apparently about to be a movie starring Michael Cera, too (from Juno and Superbad).
I don’t read much comedy; however, I thought “Tick Tock” by Dean Koontz to be a good read, if a bit unusual.
–James
Ding Ding Ding. We have a winner. The two best movies since Napoleon Dynamite. Now to see if the public library has it.
I’ll check out the other books too and any other books that are mentioned.
I hope you like it. I may have to re-read it myself, now that I’m thinking about it again. 
Funny, eh? Anything by Christopher Moore.
Practical Demonkeeping and Coyote Blue are my favorites.
Also, Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet is brilliant.
If you like puns and don’t mind fantasy (see also Terry Pratchet),
Harry Turtledove’s Toxic Spell Dump is chock full of punnery.
I like the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell… It’s science-y yet readable and it relates to nearly everything around us.
I can recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Running-Ron-McLarty/dp/0143036688
Great story, modern Americana, funny, heartwarming, sad at times. Unusually free of gangsters, fantasy, general bloodshed for a book on my shelf. But quite excellent none the less.
That is a good one. How about Robert Wolke for light reading about Post-Gastronomic Stress Syndrome?