Book Recommendations

Here are a few things that have blown me away lately.

American Pastoral - Philip Roth -- This is a complex, multi-layered work that examins the American Dream, and is also a ferocious attack on the selfish radicalism of upper-class teens and young adults in the Vietnam Era. Excerpt -

. . . the daughter and the decade blasting to smithereens his particular form of utopian thinking, the plague America infiltrating the Swede's castle and there infecting everyone. The daughter who transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, violence, and the desperation of the counter pastoral -- into the indigenous American berserk.

Viriconium - M. John Harrison -- Harrison is an author that is adored by such people as Angela Carter and Michael Moorcock, but has yet to recieve widespread acclaim. Viriconium is high literature masquerading as pulpish fantasy, and it's one of the most brilliant works I've read in quite a while. Excerpt-

And he stormed off, a gigantic paradox suspended on the thin line between comedy and horror, to test his machine by completing a full circuit of the encampment under the amazed eyes of fifteen thousand sensible fighting men.

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism - Gershom Scholem -- I'm reading this for class, and it's one of the neatest books I've ever been assigned. Apparently the books was one of Pynchon's main research tools for Gravity's Rainbow. Neat stuff. Excerpt-

The Torah is to them a living organism animated by a secret life which streams and pulsates below the crust of its literal meaning; every one of the innumerable strata of this hidden region corresponds to a new and profound meaning of the Torah.

Blood Meridian -- Cormac McCarthy -- I read this about six months ago, but I'm still amazed by it, and my close friends are probably tired of me rambling about how incredible it is. I'll let an excerpt speak for itself.

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream wit the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided calvery jackets...and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.