Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
This is very difficult for me to rate. The first two short parts are magnificent. The long middle third is mostly taken up with the long, rambling stream-of-consciousness logorrhea of Jethro Furber -- a very complex character, in the final analysis, but which is difficult to follow and unravel (though the general outlines are clear enough). The final section brings together all the threads of plot and character and language... and yet, I couldn't help but feel that the magnificent potential of Omensetter's remarkable personality and the brilliance of the opening passages were never fully taken up again. Perhaps readers with a more intimate connection to small town mid-America and (late 19th cen.) Americana will find a greater resonance in this than I did.... I may be too far from it culturally to fully appreciate what Gass was doing here....In general, probably a masterpiece -- certainly, a writer's writer -- but one that I didn't enjoy reading nearly as much as I had hoped or expected to.