July Reading and Listening Recommendation

A Confederacy of Dunces
The first I had heard of this book was as a recommendation from a friend as we were settling in for pizza on his last night in Spain before making his way back to Ireland (and eventually to South America). At the time he was halfway through the book, but sold half of the book to me as well as he could.
Later while reading 24-7 (the English guide to Valencia) I read a review of it as an "oldie but goodie". The back story is almost as interesting as the book itself.
The author, John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide in 1969, long before the book had been published. In 1976 his mother had found the manuscript while going through his belongings. She read it and took it to to Professor Walker Percy of Loyola to see if he would be interested in doing something with it. Not terribly interested on giving up time on a scratchy manuscript based on the recommendation from the dead author's mother as "pretty good", he let it sit on his desk. He eventually got around to reading the first page with the intentions of not continuing, but he was looking for a substantial reason to tell the mother that he couldn't do anything with it. As Percy tells it he found himself enjoying it and agreeing that it should be published. It was realeased in bits and pieces in 1978 in the New Orleans Review and it was finally published in its full form in 1980, eleven years after the author's death.
The story itself is about Ignatius J. Reilly a 30 year old man that still lives with his mother. He is a self-proclaimed genius and is five years into the process of writing his masterpiece about the decline of civilization since the Middle Ages. He writes at the pace of roughly a paragraph a month and references a previously written 5 page piece on the same subject that he boldly gave shelf space to in the New Orleans public library. Mrs. Irene Reilly is determined to get her son out of her house and into a job, this is where the hilarity ensues.

Broken Boy Soldiers
The Raconteurs is the "not a side project" from Brendan Benson, The White Stripes's Jack White, and Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler of The Greenhornes. Broken Boy Soldiers isn't as experiemental or groundbreaking as The White Stripes, but if you remove Jack White's previous credentials from the equation you have a fun little foot stomping collection of tunes. The influences stem more from The Beatles or the pages of No Depression than any resemblance to White's other band. For any Australian readers, you'll be looking for Broken Boy Soldiers from a band called The Saboteurs. Apparently the name, The Raconteurs, is being used by a local Queensland band that is refusing to be bought out.