I just finished Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities -- a 700-page tale of conditional morality and, well, vanity, set in New York City in the late '80s. I picked it up on a whim when I was in a hurry to get something for the flight to Europe as a light alternative to my other travel book: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (comments on that at another time). The only other Tom Wolfe I'd read is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I enjoyed, though largely for its historic relevance, since it was non-fiction and set mostly in San Francisco. I didn't enjoy Bonfire as much. Though it had me somewhat enthralled at points, it was a car-wreck sort of enthrall that doesn't leave you feeling good. Then again, I don't think that was the point of the book. Though a lot of it seemed to be social commentary relevant mostly to the time and place in which it was set, the characters and their flaws (and boy were they flawed) are probably much closer to us all than New York in the 1980s.