I just read Douglas Wolk's 33 1/3 book on James Brown's Live At The Apollo and dug it -- he connects the actual show to the Cuban Missile Crisis in a very novel way. Now about two-thirds of the way through Tom McCarthy's C and enjoying it quite a bit. It seems like it actually does what Jonathan Franzen claims to want to do: it takes the big, sprawling, postmodern novel and makes it legible and relatively easy to follow (it's also just over 300 pages). Franzen, by contrast, is just introducing contemporary themes and events to a 19th-century-style novel (I don't hate Franzen, I just don't think he's as interesting or exciting as people seem to think he is).