books i read recently

Michel Houellebecq- THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND
This book was great.  I read half of it last spring but got busy and just got around to finishing it.  I read his first novel, THE ELEMENTARY PARTICLES, this past summer and I liked that too.  PARTICLES was about the history (and decay) of a French family over the course of a century.  There is lots of sex and lots of death.  In ISLAND these topics are also prevalent, but it is is set in the present and the future rather than the past and the present.  It revolves around a cult that wants to research and implement cloning, immortality, and ways to avoid human suffering.  I think there is actually a line in the books that says something to the effect of "sex and death are all that really matter to us."  I don't know if I agree.  Houellebecq likes to write provocative shit.  A line like that isn't nearly as provocative as other lines that deal with race or gender.  I think there are usually controversies (re: obscenity) when his books are released.  I think Camus' had similar trouble with his books, and Baudellaire.  Fiction can't really be obscene though, can it?  I don't know.  This was a really good book about "neo-humans" thats about it.





Thomas Pynchon-CRYING OF LOT 49
Yeah, he's a good writer I guess.  I have alway delayed reading him but he never really interested me even though he's really acclaimed (critically).  It was a pretty funny book.  It was about a mail delivery service that was pushed out of the American business by the service that eventually became the US Postal Service.  It focuses on a woman named "Oedipa" (funny name) who inherits the estate of some wealthy dude, and she ends up unraveling a secret society and underworld codes and lots of other things. 




ON THE BRO'D
My friend told me about this website the other day:
http://onthebrod.tumblr.com/
It's an interpretation of Jack Kerouac's famous novel ON THE ROAD, told from the new perspective of a twenty-first century "bro."  I found it to be very amusing.  I tried to watch the James Franco film "HOWL" about the late poet Allen Ginsberg and the obscenity trials of his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Don Draper from Mad Men plays the defense lawyer).   It was a terrible movie but my friend who was in the room told me about this book and it was funny.  I don't know if it has merit.  What is merit?  Seems really relative....