I read Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener, and Sandra Cisnero's The House on Mango Street. Bartleby, for me, is Melville's most clear and direct criticism of capitalism, and I liked it better than I remembered. It's one of those texts that you can't quite nail down, and gives you a lot to think about -- every place you poke it, the text has a stout thickness that yields you back something in response to your inquiry. I listened to the House on Mango Street being read by the author, and she affects the voice of a young child, which makes the book much more haunting and difficult. It's written in very simple language that is often quite dreamy and poetic, which gives it a very childlike quality, and it deals with themes of sexual assault and domestic violence with the naive understanding of a child, almost obliquely. It was a harder text than I anticipated, but I think important.