I was recently asked for some book recommendations...always tricky business in my opinion. This probably has to do in part with how personal books are to me. Plus, it's like giving a gift--you always want the person to love the gift, but you also want it to say something real about who you are too.
Anyway, here are the three novels I suggested--all favorites of mine and quite different from one another.
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: I call this starter Pynchon. It's a slim novel (in pages anyway) which for Pynchon is a feat in itself. It's clever, paranoid, complex, engaging, and in typical Pynchonian fashion has a maze of a plot rife with symbolism and cultural references. It's classic postmodern fiction and a great way to try Pynchon without straining your arm muscles. Plus, there's the whole Yoyodyne thing.
Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World: Murakami is one of my all-time favorite authors. His work transports and is poetic, funny, suspenseful, thought-provoking, wildly imaginative, and successfully mixes genres/cultures/times/realities like nobody's business. This was the book that got me hooked. From the very beginning, it grabs you and brings the reader into a pretty crazy universe (actually, two of them) and questions the limits of the human mind, and an individual's relationship with society, technology, and his own humanity.
Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim: This is a classic, post-WWII British satire about academic life at a second-rate college. I love it because it's hilarious and absurd, and just fun (and easy) to read. Amis is a sharp, skilled comic writer and some of the scenes are laugh-out-loud funny. A feel-good novel, perfect for summertime reading when you want a break from the latest supermarket thriller. :)
