Call it Freebie Monday (with apologies to Nancy, who trademarked the Freebie tage). Today, Random House is giving away free downloads of the well-reviewed Let the Great World Spin, through Oprah's Book Club. Colum McCann”s novel brings together a disparate cast of New Yorkers, with a cultural touchstone of the tightrope artist who walks between the towers of the World Trader Center. This might even be the book to lift me out of a my summer slump.

Here's an excerpt from the New York Times review: Let the Great World Spin can feel like a precursor to another novel of colliding cultures: The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s classic portrait of New York in the 1980s. But McCann’s effort is less disciplined, more earnest, looser, rougher, more flawed but also more soulful — in other words, more like the city itself.