A case of "that book learnin'"

I don't know how it happened, but I seem to have caught a case of Litmania recently. That is, I've been reading a lot. And not just comics like usual (though I'll debate, or possibly even go so far as to fight anyone questioning the legitimacy of the graphic novel as a viable literary and/or artistic medium.) In the past 2 weeks, I finished Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation and Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You and am currently slogging through the last 60 pages of Greg Palast's incredibly dense The Best Democracy Money Can Buy as well as MTX's Dr. Frank's clever first novel, King Dork.

My goal is to keep 1 fiction and 1 non-fiction title going at a time. Next up on the non-fiction block is either Bloodsworth or Bowling Alone, two titles I picked up last week based on recommendations (and, in the case of the former, seeing an absolutely heartbreaking CSPAN rerun of an in-store appearance of Kirk Bloodsworth, the titular character and first US death row inmate to be exonerated based on DNA evidence.) As for the fiction, well...I don't really have any. Maybe someone could recommend some that are actually worth spending the time on since I'm drawing a complete blank. I like Elmore Leonard if that helps at all...

Incidentally, this whole thing also begs the question, do Audiobooks count as reading? I mean, sure, the whole concept of "reading" implies that your eyes are physically moving back and forth across the page, but theoretically you are engaging just as much of your mind by listening to them as you are by reading their printed counterparts, right? Just because you happen to be using a different input medium to transfer that information, shouldn't devalue the information itself. Plus, in the case that the author themself is also wearing the hat of the narrator, a unique layer of perspective is added to the experience while still simultaneously engaging your imagination. I know that they probably don't hold the same amount of street-cred (or whatever the literary equivalent of street-cred is,) as actual books do, since I'm not a pretentious fuck who goes out of his way to make sure you know just how well read I am, I'm gonna count them in tandem with the books...so take that nobody!