What should I read, this or 2666?

what should I read, this or 2666?

2666. Don't fall for the pomo meme.

Read 2666. Underworld has been the most disappointing book I have read.

If you're American (or Canadian I guess) read underworld. If you're anything else read 2666

why is it that?

Because only Americans believe their literature is worth something.

Underworld 110%.

Bolano is just derivative Pynchon and Delillo (hence why he insults both of them and pretends PKD is better).

2666 is basically a combination of Gravity's Rainbow and Underworld.

Read both. Read Underworld first, though. DeLillo is the greatest postwar novelist.

Also 2666 is nothing like GR.

"It shows a man driving a car. It is the simplest sort of family video. You see a man at the wheel of a medium Dodge.

It is just a kid aiming her camera through the rear window of the family car at the windshield of the car behind her...It is the kid's own privacy that is being protected here. She is twelve years old and her name is being withheld even though she is neither the victim nor the perpetrator of the crime but only the means of recording it.

It shows a man in his forties wearing a pale shirt open at the throat, the image washed by reflections and sunlight, with many jostled moments.

It is not just another video homicide. It is a homicide recorded by a child who thought she was doing something simple and maybe halfway clever, shooting some tape of a man in a car.

He sees the girl and waves briefly, wagging a hand without taking it off the wheel - and underplayed reaction that makes you like him…

It shows him giving an abbreviated wave, stiff-palmed, like a flag at a siding...

You know how fmailies make up games. This is just another game in which the child invents the rules as she goes along. She likes the idea of videotaping a man in his car. She has probably never done it before and she sees no reason to vary the format or terminate early or pan to another car. Thisis her game and she is learning it and playing it as the same time. She feels halfway clever and inventive and maybe slightly intrusive as well, a little of brazenness that spices any game."

"And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny.

Of course if she had panned to another car, the right car at the precise time, she would have caught the gunman as he fired.

He is hit soon after. If you've seen the tape many times you know from the hand wave exactly when he will be hit. It is something, naturally, that you wait for. You say to your wife, if you're at home and she is there, Now here is where he gets it….

Now here is where he gets it. You see him jolted, sort of wire-shocked – then he seizes up and falls toward the door or maybe learns or slides into the door is the proper way to put it. It is awful and unremarkable at the same time. Here it comes all right. He is shot, head-shot, and the camera reacts, the child reacts – there is a jolting movement but she keeps on taping, there is a sympathetic response, a nerve response, her heart is beating faster but she keeps the camera trained on the subject as he slides into the door and even as you see him die you're thinking of the girl. At some level the girl has to be present here, watching what you're watching, unprepared – the girl is seeing this cold and you have to marvel at the fact that she keeps the tape rolling.

It shows the car drifting toward the guardrail and then there's a jostling sense of two other lanes and part of another car, a split-second blur, and the tape ends here, either because the girl stopped shooting or because some central authority, the police or the district attorney or the TV station, decided there was nothing else you had to see.

This is either the tenth or eleventh homicide committed by the Texas Highway Killer. The number is uncertain because the police believe that one of the shootings may have been a copycat crime.

The more you watch the tape, the deader and colder and more relentless it becomes. The tape sucks the air right out of your chest but you watch it every time."