( Read more... )

Aaaaaannd....now I know where Inverarity's livejournal username and picture come from. I guess you're a real Pynchon fan, eh Inverarity?

( Mercury Shrugged: The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon )

Thomas Pynchon is a brilliant writer. The writing is imaginative, vivid, sometimes very funny. But, as V. demonstrates, a brilliant writer can be a dreadful novelist. The book is long, disjointed, and in the end (or rather, starting close to the beginning) very tedious. I did force myself to read it to the end (sustaining myself along the way by ( Read more... )

In the first chapter of The Life of Insects we meet two Russians, Andrew and Arthur, businessmen apparently, and a foreigner, Sam. They are negotiating some kind of business deal. Sam insists they begin immediately to asses the situation and set off in search of "samples." They set off, and are transformed into mosquitos. Or perhaps they have been ( Read more... )

( Translator's Scary Nocturnal Vision: A Void, by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair )

A one-liner cannot do justice to this long work of a lifetime, but it's damned fine reading and the most nuanced, character-focused epic you've ever read.


( Read more... )

First publication date: 1950
Genre:                        Officially fantasy but just because it is set in an imaginary kingdom
Edition:                       11, in 1998
Publisher:                    Vintage Books, Great Britain
Format:                       Paperback
Pages:                         505
Source:                        Amazon
Price:        ( Read more... )

( Sex, Drugs and Rocket Science: Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon )

Title Mason and Dixon
Author Thomas Pynchon
Page count 773
Published 1997
Summary (taken from amazon) A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of ( Read more... )

The trusting and the maimed by James Plunkett
220 pages
1955

There are 10 stories in this book.  They all take place in Ireland and they are all depressing.  Usual I read a book of this size in a couple hours but it took a little over a month to read this book.  There are things I didn't like about the stories.  One, the character were more caritures ( Read more... )