It's time for another installment of the Book Rat Project, the sustained experiment in which a book critic (my Phoenix colleague Eugenia Williamson) attempts to act as a human algorithm for a willing subject (me).

After last week’s qualified disappointment, Eugenia decided to go in a very different direction and chose David Vann’s newest literary horror story, Dirt.

I had a hard time getting Dirt; in the first 48-hours I don’t think I made it through 15 pages. But then something clicked and before I knew it I was turning the pages so quickly I didn’t have time to tweet any excerpts.