Since this is all I've been doing...

This week I read American Pastoral by Philip Roth and Everything Is Illuminated by J Safran Foer. I just bought Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem in hardcover because I couldn't wait.

American Pastoral was not necessarily predictable (because that would be unfair; the whole plot is laid out on purpose in the first twenty pages) but somehow... expected? Like any novel on the sixties as the decade when American utopianism officially rolled over and died.

Everything Is Illuminated made me cry a couple of times. It was good, but not my new favorite book. But good.

In high school I went through a phase where it seemed like everything I read was about African-American women overcoming sexual trauma (Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat). Now everything I read is about Jewish men interrogating their identities. Are there any books like these but with Jewish women? What genre does a 1/2 wasp, 1/4 catholic and 1/4 jewish female write in? Is that like Joyce Carol Oates? Please say it isn't.