Amazon.com (ISBN 0801856582, Paperback)

The great skeptic and prose stylist H.L. Mencken had a lifelong habit of keeping notebooks that he'd plumb for ideas. He eventually collected many brief essays from his notebooks and published them as Minority Report, claiming in the book's introduction that the pieces had been selected at random. That may be true, but as Mencken's writing discipline seemed to require him to always produce elegant prose, it's fair to say that his random notebook entries are superior to the polished essays of many other writers. Mencken was simply a national treasure, and Minority Report, as it contains a great many of his observations on a wide variety of subjects, is a good place to begin to get a taste of his eccentrically intelligent style.