Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo (1972). New York: Scribner, 1996.

I assigned for my students a book I'd never before read. Now I've read it. I'm not disappointed. This happens sometimes. One professor put Amidon's Human Capital on a booklist of a class I took before he'd actually read it, and that turned into Snoozefest '07. This book has Gates, Jr. cred. It's got Baldwin cred. I should be fine once I figure out what on earth I'm going to talk about in class.

In brief: Mumbo Jumbo tracks the growing infestation of "Jes Grew" from Chicago eastward as it heads to 1920s NYC. Everyone in the Harlem Renaissance is at least named, and often appears in a scene or two. Cab Calloway. Langston Hughes. What Jes Grew is is a need to dance and shake your booty, and it turns out that this urge has been suppressed by a certain fascistic group dating back to Ancient Egypt. The Knights Templar—so beloved by a lot of backward looking storytellers nowadays—are painted as especially evil and, well perhaps even more so, stupid and buffoonish.

In a class looking at the humorous novel it'll be tough pointing out the humor to my students. Much of the stuff I wrote "ha!" about in the margins of the book were things that I thought I pretty much got the joke of, because I'm down with the history of African-American culture in the 20th century, right? I'm worried in class in a couple of weeks that I'll be gratingly with-it like I was back in college when I used to brag about liking Digable Planets and Soul Coughing. Like it made me urban.

In the end, I think Flight to Canada—about lots of the writers of the antebellum/transcendental era of U.S. lit—is a more engaging book, and a funnier one. But that's probably because I got all the jokes.