I need to read more contemporary literature. I've been doing a lot of history books and old-school literature for the last year and they are starting to run a bit stale. Running across a bit of a "Where to start" problem though.
It helps if you're not all-heavy-all-the-time reading. Throw in some garbage fiction too. I listen to commercial shit on tape when I drive, and I read the heavy stuff on paper. So if I get sick of one I've got the other. ANYWAY -- modern lit is like super-varied. Kurt Vonnegut is crazy good, and also just crazy -- sometimes described as a mad scientist, which fits, and his books share absurd elements from an insane universe that somehow makes more sense than ours? It's weirdly genius, and probably evil. Uh, who else.... Well Cormac, obviously, but that's the heaviest of all heavy things. I mean "Child of God" was a character study of a serial-rapist-turned-murderer-turned-necrophile, and somehow that doesn't really capture the depravity of it all. If I had to put it into words, I think he makes you understand things that later on you probably wish you didn't -- and he does it with maybe the best prose in the history of writing. You just wanna make sure you can lay hands on a dictionary before you even get started, because you'll be needing one. Then there's always your more conventional/older/classic-er stuff, like Farenheit 411, which isn't strictly-speaking MODERN but just kinda timeless. If I could talk you into one book (and you haven't read it yet), Farenheit 411. Fucking brilliant. Then, I mean, reward your brain for smartsing, and feed it some Michael Chrichton or something.
Sorry that ain’t very merry to say, why is this game so scary to play?
Well let me think, cause every day my balls are getting too hairy to shave
Pause a minute, I’m stressin’ the game if I go to hell, then heaven’s to blame
I don’t mean to come off crazy but you motherfuckers seem to think that I’m hella deranged
