DFK, have you read the piece that Jonathan Franzen did on Wallace this week.
Speaking of Franzen (I've never read a word of his fiction, by the way):
He wrote a forward to this Swedish police procedural I just finished:
The Laughing Policeman, by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, one of the books in the esteemed Martin Beck series. Now, reading this was a bit of a hardship case; I'd bought it, sometime in the last 1 1/2-2 years while looking for good wintertime travel reading, along with 2 of the VERY esteemed Henning Mankell books.
The first of the Mankell books, which I'd chosen basically at random, was probably the worst, least plausible mystery I've ever read:
The Man Who Smiled. The second, which I read only because I'd already spent the money on it, was better (
The Dogs of Riga), but it didn't overcome the memory of life-hours wasted reading
The Man Who Smiled.Well,
The Laughing Policeman may not have been by the same author, but still, it was a Swedish police procedural, and I was already convinced that the genre is just not for me. Halfway through the slog, I told my gf: "I'm not sure I can do this...everybody is miserable, everybody has a cold, Stockholm in 1967 sounds like the second-most horrible city ever, after New York 1n 2011, so why do I wanna subject myself to this? Oh well, I'm kinda curious how the mystery turns out..."
And then, in the latter third, I suddenly became totally invested in the solution to the mystery. It turned out to be a great crime novel! And then I read Franzen's foreword and found out that in fact, all that misery and griping about every aspect of Stockholm society in the late 60's was not only the whole point of the Martin Beck mysteries, but also freakin' hilarious! And then I realized he was right! (There are passages in there about the Christmas season that are so unrelentingly acidulous that I'm already planning to post them somewehre duting next year's War On Xmas.)
Now I need to read the other nine Martin Beck novels.