The Crying of Lot 49

So, as I said a couple of weeks ago, I totally wussed out and refused to read Blood Meridian. 

Instead, I gave it to my father, who likes westerns, and he read it and has now pronounced it awful.  But then again, he couldn't stop talking about it, either.....

Instead of reading Blood Meridian, I read The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which is also on Time's list.

Here's what Time had to say about it:

Summoned to serve as executor for the will of her ultra-rich former lover, Oedipa Maas is led into the mystery of Trystero, a shadowy band of, of — of what exactly? They have operated for centuries, connecting the dispossesed, the discontented and the strung out by way of their secret underground postal system, a network that may also serve other ends. As she wanders through California in the mid-1960′s, trying to unravel their secret, Oedipa senses for the first time a larger, weirder universe of the disinherited, a scampering, fugitive reality just beneath the placid surface of what she thinks she knows. With its slapstick paranoia and its heartbreaking metaphysical soliloquies, Lot 49 takes place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly recognizable as Pynchon-land. Is it also a mystery novel? Absolutely, so long as you remember that the mystery here is the one at the heart of everything.

I liked this book - sorta....  

I'm not sure I'm deep enough to have fully comprehended everything that was going on but it was an enjoyable read.  It was weird, strange....  I don't know. 

HOWEVER, if you are a fan of Buckaroo Banzai (which I totally happen to be) you will recognize the origins of that movie in this book.  Methinks W.D. Richter is a Pynchon fan.