I love the astonishing, random facts and commentary one will come across in books. Since the UCLA Southland Conference in early June, I’ve continued to do research on academic novels (among many, many other tasks), which includes reading The Academic Novel: New and Classic Essays—a collection edited by Merritt Moseley that’s so esoteric Amazon doesn’t list it. In the introduction, Moseley says that famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a novel (and one, he adds, with “almost no literary merit”). Alas, I’ve found many a meritless academic novel, perhaps in part because, as Moseley says, “There is no end to the surprises, when one first beings to discover all the writers who have published an academic novel.”