So last week I finished Norman Mailer's 1948 release, The Naked and the Dead, and Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. The combo of these was enough to make me thoroughly depressed. Mailer's book was an engaging war novel (WWII). Lessing's became a staple of the radical feminists in 1962, when it was published. Yet in my view her book does little to actually advance women and more to suggest women acting badly can match men acting badly.

Both represent gritty, honest writing. And both seem to echo the king who wrote, "Vapor, vapor, all is vapor."