I can only buy one book right now, which one should I get?

I can only buy one book right now, which one should I get?

Voyage to Arcturus has a special place in my heart, it's so absolutely unique. But it's also a frustrating read since it's so uneven.

Today I Wrote Nothing is fun. Ask The Dust was meh, only interesting if you want to see where Bukowski came from. Post Office is meh too.

If On A Winters Night A Traveler may be your best bet on that list

I can only strip it down to four: Calvino, DeLillo, Marquez, Fitzgerald. Whatever you do, don't waste your money on Latke 49, Pynchon can do much better than that

90% of this looks like trash. Don't buy Pynchon - he's absolute trash, and TCOL49 is the shittiest book I have ever read.

I would probably go with 100 Years of Solitude.

Either 100 Years or Tropic Of Cancer.

Also, Crying is Pynchon's best you fucking plebs.

Pretty much this.

If you don't have money download the books that are in the public domain. In Search of Lost Time is easily the best in that list so if you're motivated to read the whole thing just go for it.

That's why I discarded Proust, I thought that In Search of Lost Time is a big investment money-wise. You are correct about it being the best though.
Lacks in thematical depth and fails to paint the picture of the time period it's set in; characters have zero depth even compared to other Pinecone works. It's just gags, le PoMo and semi-enjoyable prose.

The great Gatsby or fear and loathing in Las Vegas

The Beetle Leg is a terrible place to start with Hawkes if you've never read anything by him before, but more of you fags need to read him.

Buy used and get two. I've bought plenty of books used on thrift.books or other similar eBay stores and it's a gamble but most of my copies have been pretty good. The people that sell their books to a goodwill or used book store aren't often the people who will read a paperback until it's beat up and worn out. For example, my copy of lonesome dove, tcol49, fear and loathing, v., and several others I can't remember have been pretty much brand new. I did get a shitty copy of hardcover catch 22 that was beat up and had docked edges but such is life. Anyways sorry for blog post; buy used books.

Lot 49 definitely isn't his best but it paints a decent enough picture of that awkward moment between 50s alcoholism and the 60s LSD haze.

Also I would recommend white noise, tcol49, or swanns way

on a winter's night

I don't know, man, I guess I'm fucking retarded and need longer texts to get the point the author's making, but I just wasn't feeling that picture with Latke.

It starts with too much kirsch (a liquor made from cherries) in the fondue and she spends pretty much the rest of the book shitfaced but the world around her is rapidly turning into one that makes no sense to a boozer.

I say that because Lot is fucking jammed packed with scenes and ideas that wrap around the main idea tightly. It's unique to this one book that Pynchon has such densely packed brevity to where every page does service to the themes. Perfect example is Oedipa and the coats, she wraps herself in all the coats and therefore can't be undressed and cheat on her husband. It's a very goofy screwball moment obviously, but the surface metaphor is relevant to the conspiracy with how Oedipa keeps pulling back the layers and there's another layer beneath that and eventually she has no way of knowing if the next layer is the final naked truth. This would be fine by itself if not the fact this is direct reference to the Mahabharata where Yudhishthira loses his kingdom and his wife by gambling, but when they try to strip and disgrace the wife more robes show up under her robes, they keep pulling and pulling and there are piles of robes all around and she's still clothed. This is a huge important reference because the Mahabharata is a deep representation of Karmic worldview, that is that every single action has some effect in some way, therefore everything is connected in a wide interweaving causality. This is huge that Crying is referencing this since Crying is all about tracing causes and effects and our inability to unearth them since they're either so interwoven or just coincidental. Referencing the Mahabharata hints that it would be the former rather than the latter. The reference has aesthetic ties as well since the story featuring long endless streams of Draupadi's robes directly relates to the painting he references later on of the fates in their tower weaving the endless strands of fate cloth.
That's one scene.

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The Great Gatsby.

Proust or Calvino can't really go wrong with either.

Some of the others are inferior or have better novels (eg DeLillo, Pynchon)

Yay, someone gets it.

I don't understand the hate for Lot, it seems every argument against it is surface-level.