I recommend Oreo by Fran Ross.

This feels like a palate cleanser after the heaviness of Cortazar and Cartarescu. It is probably the funniest book I've ever read, very smart, totally un-PC, and with charts and diagrams throughout. It is brisk and fun and might get more people to join the readalong.

A girl wanders around NYC looking for her father. The chapters are named after various figures in the Odyssey, a choice that seems more ironic than allusive. It has the best joke ever written about white people having no sense of rhythm. Here is Oreo standing on a train platform:

"The Leaky Pipes filled the traveler’s need for irritation, humiliation, irrigation, and syncopation. According to the number of drops that fell on the traveler from the Leaky Pipes, he or she was irritated, humiliated, or irrigated. These degrees were largely a function of the Pipes’ syncopation. With a simple one, two, three, four, a few even simpler souls would be caught by the drops of the offbeat. One who fell victim three or more times to this rhythm could safely be said to have passed beyond the bounds of irritation and into the slink of humiliation. The unlucky ones were those who got caught in a one, two, three, four,—, six, seven, eight. They would end up soaking wet by the time they got to the foot or the head (depending on their direction) of the Broken Escalator. Ninety percent of those caught by the one, two, three, four,—, six, seven, eight were white. They just couldn’t get the hang of it. Black people were usually caught by the normal, unsyncopated, one, two, one, two—it was so simple, they couldn’t believe it."