It think it is cool that I would read four books set in New York (Ragtime, A Rage in Harlem, and The Portable Dorothy Parker). This is a weird book. I think it was my least favorite of the four (although Dorothy Parker's was incredibly depressing - like her life!).
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Mumbo Jumbo may be the most rambunctious novel you’ll ever read, a noir mystery steeped in the lore of African American HooDoo, the social tumult and political corruption of the 1920s, Egyptian mythology, and the deep wells of Ishmael Reed’s idiosyncratic imagination. Shrewdly synthetic in its creative logic, Mumbo Jumbo is simultaneously fierce and funny, jubilant and angry. Exploding across its own pages like illicit fireworks, the book is a startling and colorful illumination of the tangled history of black-white relations.
