John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy proved a pretty quick big read once you get used to the different narrative elements he uses (3 or 4 plane rides/plenty of airport and hotel time also help).I'm not sure I liked it (them?) as much as Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer which was able to fit in a lot of the same themes into one volume with less characters, while admittedly only really focusing on NYC. Parts were amazing: Mac in The 42nd Parallel was an interesting Ulysses Everett McGill-type, the "all is lost" Camera Eye (50) section gave context to labor struggles of the time, and the biographical section on the Unknown Soldier was the strongest of the many biographies of contemporary figures including Edison, T. Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Woodrow Wilson and others. The main sections that focused on different character studies were distinct until about halfway through 1919 (the book and, i guess, the year) when the characters voices got a little too similar and just started to serve as surrogates to experience the events of the early 20th Century. That being said, the trilogy does lead the reader through the major events of the American 20th Century, including enough labor issues to make Howard Zinn proud.
So of course that means only one more book, Joseph McEllroy's Women & Men, which according to this post on the excellent LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy, is one and a half times as long as War & Peace. Shit.
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