about reading

The New York Observer asked some people what they were reading this summer. This was an especially entertaining answer:
(more at http://observer.com/culture_observatory.asp )

Tom Wolfe, writer, I Am Charlotte Simmons
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane. If Stephen Crane hadn’t died at the age of 29, he would have been remembered as a giant. I’m literally rummaging around my desk to see what exciting things I have here …. The Abs Diet by David Zinczenko. Here’s the thing: I never really had sharply defined abs, even when I was an athlete. I always wanted them to look like a cobblestone street. That was before six-packs; they didn’t have six-packs, but they did have cobblestone streets. My wife said, “You have cobblestone streets, but they’ve been paved over.” Here’s a real barn-burner: Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas. This has to do with what I hope to write: a history of the last 1,000 years of the world in 98 pages. It was going to be 100 pages, but 98 sounds so much shorter, don’t you think? No one is interested in this book but me. There’s a book called Status Anxiety; the fellow has kind of a French name. [Alain de Botton.] That’s another thing I want to write— a book about status ….
And Hemmings Motor News, which is a thick periodical—this one I’m looking at is 672 pages. It’s full of ways to either fix up old cars or do things with new cars …. This is all part of my desire and attempt to, as they now say, pimp my ride. I have a Cadillac DeVille, which people think of as a stodgy old-people’s car, but I have the intention to show people that this is a sensational old-people’s car once I pimp it.