I've knocked off books five and six in my attempt to complete the 50 Book Challenge in 2005. The first was a non-fiction volume on depression and its causes. Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression was a fairly harrowing account of the disease and ways of contending with it. The book is especially eye-opening to the suffering of various artists, especially writers such as Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. The book is at its best when working through accounts of the afflictions of real people, and suffers somewhat when it lapses into history and other long periods of exposition.

I followed that lengthy read up with one that turned out to be surprisingly quick and easy. Christine Schutt's Florida was nominated for the recent National Book Award for fiction, and like the other entrants in the category, it's an original, "literary" means of telling a tale. It's easily the best of the fiction entrants for the award (I do still have one left to read) and is consistently engaging, smart, funny and heartbreaking all at once. I'm honestly disappointed that the voters on the committee somehow didn't see fit to reward this one over the others (though I reserve the right to change my mind once I've read Ideas of Heaven if it's fantastic).