At 03:01 PM 6/6/02 -0700, Benito Vergara wrote:
Is it that time of the year again? =)
- Mark Danielewski's "House of Leaves"
I haven't read any of the other candidates (except Recognitions, which I'd say is for Gaddis completists only, read JR instead). However, House of Leaves is one of the few books I can remember that made my skin creep. For those who don't know (no spoilers here), the story concerns a family where they discover that their house is measurably larger on the inside than the outside, and the story is wrapped in an incredibly realistic scholarly commentary apparatus (read *all* of the footnotes) and extremely innovative typesetting for a widely available novel. Stunning on all levels, I cannot recommend this book too highly. I recently finished Russell Banks' tale of abolitionist John Brown, Cloudsplitter, which moved pretty quickly for an 800-page novel. I will say I found the novel much more traditional than some of Banks' earlier work, but still very well done. For thrillers, Jean-Christophe Grangé's Flight of the Storks was the most gripping, but I also enjoyed Hiassen's Basket Case. I also read Elmore Leonard's Pagan Babies -- anyone else think his earlier work is *much* better than the more recent stuff? For my recent non-fiction slogging, I'm slowly working through Francois Furet's Passing of an Illusion, a history of the idea of communism. I grew up in the USA in the 50s and 60s, where the worst thing you could call someone was a commie. This book gives me an extremely interesting context for that attitude, although so far (just finishing WWII) it has been much more Eurocentric than directly related to events in the US. It's a very nice addition to the series of 'history of the 20th century' books I've been reading over the last few years, including the likes of Hobsbawm and Johnson. np: Lutz Glandien, Fifth Elephant -- Caleb Deupree cdeupree@erinet.com