Nick was the country-to-city character I was thinking of in Gatsby. Well, not so much country-to-city as wholesome-midwest-to-corrupt-east, but they're variations on a theme.

Also, for US as country and Europe as city, see, famously, Henry James.

I'll second the rec for "The Devil in the White City." There were several places where I wanted to tell the author to go back and tone things down a touch, but overall, it was well-written, and well-constructed.

Lost my connection for a bit.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll be looking at them. I have until Thursday to make my picks.

I just got done reading this anthology called "The Cocaine Chronicles". Amazon picked it for me because I like "The Wire". I enjoyed it a lot.

I just finished Maggie Helwig's Where She Was Standing, which was fantastic. She's a Canadian novelist and poet, and sometime human rights activist. The novel concerns the (fictional) massacre of protestors in East Timor by the Indonesian military in the mid-1990s. A Canadian film student is caught up in the massacre, and the novel asks and answers questions about what happens to her, her film, her family, and the Timorese people she met while she was there.

The prose is brilliant, the story gripping and meaningful and very important. It's one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. It's also a love story of sorts, and a meditation on working in the public interest, and the cost that entails.

I really liked it a lot. Sadly, she's not really in print in the US and you have to order her stuff from Canada.

(And yes, former X-Philes: this is the Maggie Helwig you're thinking of.)

There's a brilliant biography called Parallel Lives which is all about Victorian visions of marriage. It's by a feminist scholar and has a chapter each on the Dickenses (early happy marriage decays, husband blames wife and sets up mistress), the Ruskins (husband won't consummate marriage because wife is somehow icky), George Eliot and her lovers...

It's vivid and immediate and provokes lots of thoughts about your own relationships.

because wife is somehow icky

I thought it was the pubic hair that flipped him out.

I actually *did* enjoy Curious Incident and thought the author did a great job capturing autistic savant-ness.

I thought it was the pubic hair that flipped him out.

That's one guess. Nobody knows for sure. All that's really known is that he pulled the nightgown from her shoulders and was put off. Effie's second husband reported no complaints, so the problem is clearly his rather than hers.