My next book, the one after the one I'm reading right now, will likely be The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, sometimes called Murakami's best, and is, if I remember correctly, your current material?
Now, though, I'm working on the first novel of one of the few guys I mentioned we'd be talking about in the first post:
This is one of the various editions of The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace.
Pynchon, Murakami, Wallace and Robbins, they seem to be the Core Four. Maybe my next one will be Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins (just found a 1st edition for a buck).
Okay, so, Norm, I know you've got very little time to do any reading. But, if there's anybody to get with after exhausting the formidable list of the Ruk-man's works would be the three--three--novels by Wallace. The first one is here, the second is the 1200+ page Infinite Jest , and the third was published posthumously, and called The Pale King.
This book truly belongs on the list we're building here. The main character is a young lady named Lenore Beadsman. For some reason her elderly great-grandmother (and some kind of mentor) has disappeared, which is kinda weird anyway, but the fact she needs to be in a sauna-like room at 98.6 degrees because she's turned cold-blooded makes it even more oddball. The action mostly takes place in and around Cleveland, and with a trip to Amherst. There's the G.O.D., or Great Ohio Desert, and a company that creates deserts; the Beadsman family is a giant in the baby-foods industry, and the name of the patriarch is Stonecipher. Other names that are Pynchonian: Mindy Metalman, Judith Prietht, and a great big fat-man trying to eat himself to an infinite weight named Bombardini, Lenore's older and jealous boyfriend named Rick Vigorous, and a narcissistic parrot named Vlad the Impaler, and I'm only halfway through.
It's been pretty wacky in a non-Murakami way.
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