Y: The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughn

This pleases my apocalyptic fantasizing. Planes fall from the sky, cars crash, governments collapse, the last images of man are slicked in the blood that spews from their orifices when a  mystery pandemic hits. The world's population falls by half and Yorick is the last man on earth.  He's suddenly left with the mystery of the plague, an existential crisis (why him?), hot girls wanting him, and hot girls wanting him dead. It doesn't really get much deeper than that, even if there are some attempts at gender role exploration. This is pulp territory: he's got a monkey sidekick and a ninja assassin follows him around.  The White House, Israeli soldiers, world class bio-geneticists,  militant feminist cults are all major players in the fast moving labyrinthine plot.  Scattered throughout the intrigue, there are enough spectacles of blood and flesh to satisfy the feverish mind of a sick or bed-ridden person.

The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith

I didn't like this much. The main character is bratty, hard to relate to, and uninteresting in her exploits. I felt myself not caring very much, and consequently stuck inside her weak mind for the duration of a book.  God damnit.

Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Letham

Fun and funny and full of near gibberish wordplay. The words bounce around like a pinball in a pinball machine. High energy, scattershot verbal smatterings over an ostensibly grim detective story.

The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

“A remarkable book. . . . As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is an anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ’female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.” —The New York Times

I identified with the anger, the bitterness, the confusion and amused distance that responded from the lies, half lies, truth of the author's mother.  More often though, I was dazzled by her vivid, earthy prose.

The Hunger Games Trilogy, Suzanne Collins

Like Y: The Last Man, these are great books to read through when bed-ridden. Plot based, they were devoured by me in a fever.

In My Life, Dick Cheney

Satisfying as an account of an insider who's been in 4 or 5 administrations. It provides quite a bit of insight into behind the scenes view of our political machinery. Funny as a memoir because it is so self-congratulatory. There are many, many anecdotes, pulled through out his lifetime, that end with Dick giving someone else a zinger. "Hah!", he must think, "I sure gave him a comeuppance!".  Successful in making me empathize with his heart issues, which previously I've only thought about in late night talk show comedian terms. Curiously unrevealing about his political leanings, while reaffirming his  self-righteousness and extreme conviction. Suspect as a document of history.  Overall, pretty fascinating.