THE CRYING OF LOT 49
Thomas Pynchon
Jason Read This and Thinks This This book is about 200 pages long and is a quick and easy read the first time you take a notion to do it. It is the perfect introduction to Thomas Pynchon, who is generally left unread by a lot of people because he is wrongly considered a difficult person to understand. The reason that it is so good an introduction is that Pynchon puts multiple layers of meaning in his stories, and packs sentences with jokes and hidden meanings, but at the same time writes them so that they can be enjoyed in a straightforward way.
The Crying of Lot 49 is about one woman's realization that there is a conspiratorial underground postal service that has been behind the scenes for 200 years and that involves pretty much everyone except her. She has to deal with the fact that she is either wildly paranoid or there is a group of people that use wastebaskets as mail drops, and bathroom graffiti as bulletin boards.
And it builds and builds and ends with a crescendo that when I read it made me hateful because I will never, ever write anything that good in the course of my life. And then I read it again and realized that there was weird between-the-lines shit, and then I did some research and found out that books have been written about this book, elucidating pretty much every single line, college classes are taught based on it, dig, it's worshiped by people who are heavy into books. Like the word "God" is used 4 times, and you can either let it just slide by as part of the text, or you can read it as a direct invocation of a deity, and let that read make the book something entirely other than what you initially read it as.
And even if you don't get it, even if you think that the book sucks, you immediately get intellectual points just by having it in your collection.
Ruthless Ratings
10 out of 10 postmodern points. You better believe it, bubi.
