The Crying of Uke 49

Another reason to pick up the Pynchon?

The biggest surprise, not counting the space devoted to Lake Baikal, white slavery, Tamerlane's tomb and Jonah and the whale, is an astonishing excess of ukuleles. I mean, they show up more often than doggerel and puns. There is even a ukulele version of Chopin's Nocturne in E minor.

—John Leonard, "Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind," The Nation