>and just shook my head.
>
>Powers is always compared to Pynchon, but I've never been able
>to crack a Pynchon novel.
>

From what I read about them in reviews Pynchon's books sound an awful lot like Kurt Vonnegut/William Burroughs type stuff. That's not really what I'm into these days. . . when I was in high school I read a lot of Burroughs though. I still appreciate his sense of humor (he once said of the American Flag "Soak it in heroin and I'll suck on it". . . or something like that).

>I think that's a great choice for Roth. That's definitely my
>favorite of his, and it's part of a trilogy, each book of
>which relates to a decade, and each of which is narrated by
>Zuckerman. American Pastoral is the 60s and liberal
>activism.... I Married A Communist is the 50s and McCarthyism.
> The Human Stain is the 90s and this neo-puritanism
>exemplified by the Clinton impeachment.

I was a big fan of Sabbath's Theater. That one really captured something about America in the 90s I thought.

>And you've probably seen me say on here that I'm one of those
>who doesn't love Confederacy of Dunces. I understand that
>it's genius, I know that people think it's hysterically funny,
>and I just found it vulgar and grim.

I see.

>But that's not to say
>that you shouldn't read it. You should. Everyone should at
>least try it, because the people who love it LOVE it. And it
>would be a shame not to have read it if it were to turn out
>that you were one of the people who love it.

Yeah. Who knows. . . maybe I'll like it, maybe I won't. I just feel like I ought to at least be familiar with it.

I also want to read William Kennedy's "Ironweed" and Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road". . . not that that one's especially new. But then it did come out in 1961 and not 1861.