Planetarium - politics/music/culture/smarts

Planetarium is a little bit obsessed these days, and with good reason: we're all reading Philip Roth's Pulitzer-Prize-winning American Pastoral. This fairly simple story of a Jewish father whose American dream turns into a nightmare (ouch, we apologize for that one, we've clearly been doing too many reviews lately) is definitely one of the more impressive novels we've come across of late. It's the kind of book we all want to be reading all the time, but rarely are: that great book that inspires us to think and be moved simultaneously, political and personal, weighty yet compulsively readable, the kind of novel you'd like to think of yourself as being capable of writing, yet know you aren't. Seeing as how we always want to be reading this kind of book, how come we rarely are? And television is no longer as good an excuse as it once was.