Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
This book is enormous - 600 pages -- consisting of masses of detail, anecdote, quotations, iconographical studies of all aspects of death from tombs, epitaphs, cemeteries, the danse macabre, Sade, the vanitas mundi, mirrors, medicalization, procession.... on and on -- including much about early Christian/medieval eschatology, friars, early modern prelates, humanists... and so forth. I was only able to read it by mustering all my forces of speed, skim, leap..., and latch... and a sudden leap to the end... The argument is summarized on pp. 602-614. Probably 60% of each paragraph could have been omitted, including all the rhetorical questions, apostrophes, insinuations, intonations, redundancies... and the book would have been much improved. For those interested in medieval or early modern art, however, there is much of value here -- if you can find it.The book actually did skim very well.