The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Book #29 on my aught-six reading list was Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning epic The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Holy crap Batman, this is a long book. Clocking in at 636 pages it sets a new record for my book reading challenge. Between this tome and last years reading of The Fortress of Solutide, I've now clocked in almost 1,150 pages of novels about comic books reading. Not bad given that I don't own any comics and never collected them growing up.

Don't get me wrong though the book is actually quite good despite its length. As Jill is fond of saying, "if your book is longer than the Bible it'd better be better than the Bible." That's a tall order but Chabon delivers the goods and manages to cleverly avoid the scriptural trap of spending the first hundred pages covering how Superman knew Wonder Woman who beget Aqua Boy who lived to be 1,000 years old and so on.

Salon has a well written review of the book here and Wikipedia has a summary here. And how many books have their own fan site?!

If you're too lazy to read it you're in luck as it looks like the wheels are in motion to turn the novel into a movie (perhaps a trilogy?). One rumor on the interweb is that Natalie Portman might be cast to play Rosa, which would be pretty frickin' sweet.