Recent reads:

A Houseboat on the Styx, by John Kendrick Bangs and Peter Newell. I've heard this book referred to time and time again on fiction-related listservs. Finally I was able to order a copy for Suburban Public Library, thanks to Kessinger Publishing's extensive catalog of print-on-demand editions of public domain works.

Unfortunately, the book didn't quite live up to its billing. It is witty, and it is clever, and it is somewhat amusing, but there's no plot to speak of. The reader is essentially a witness to the arguments and conversations that Bangs puts into the incorporeal mouths of various deceased souls inhabiting a gentleman's club aboard the titular houseboat. It's clever and amusing at first to hear Samuel Johnson and William Shakespeare in animated disputation with Socrates, et al, but the novelty wears off before one reaches the end of the book.

Rumor has it that Connie Willis alludes to this book in To Say Nothing of the Dog. I expect that tracking down her allusion to it will be more satisfying than the work itself.