As 2008 approaches its halfway point, that whole "52 Books, 52 Weeks" New Years Resoultion is looking pretty sad. As regular readers may recall, up to this point I've managed to finish exactly two books for the year and none since March. It's a shameful total, to be sure, and perhaps provides support to the recent claim in The Atlantic that the internet is making us stupid. (See Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008.)

The numerous unfinished books (Atonement, How I Learned to Cook, A Long Way Down) strewn about my apartment right now is a testament to my shrinking attention span. And while some might find solace in the fact that they manage to read Entertainment Weekly from cover to cover every single week, it just makes me all the more ashamed.

Well, amidst this colossal failure I'm happy to report that I finished not one but TWO books yesterday.

The Camel Club by David Baldacci was a pretty pedestrian mass market political thriller. I'm not sure there was a single believable character or line of dialogue in the entire book, but Baldacci did execute the action sequences in the second half of the novel quite well. I seem to have grown tired of these kinds of pulpy thriller in recent years, a development I suspect is due in part to raised expectations for crime stories brought on by HBO's excellent procedural series, "The Wire." Which is why my next crime novel will be one by Richard Price, a staff writer on the series.

The Hamburger: A History by Josh Ozersky is a quick read, clocking in at under 140 pages, but it provides an enjoyable history of our favorite sandwich, focusing mainly on the rise of fast food hamburger chains in post-war America. Interestingly, the two biggest pioneers in the world of assembly-line burgers, McDonald's and White Castle, are the only two chains to have resisted buyouts from larger conglomerates and remain staunchly independent to this day (though each has taken a vastly different route from the other since their inceptions).

It's probably no small coincidence that I managed to double my reading output for the year in a single day right after I cancelled my cable television. So, with 2008 now in its 25th week: 4 down, 48 to go!