My favorite book is House of Leaves. I recently purchased Mark Z. Danielwski's new novel The Familiar. Other books I have enjoyed are Kurt Vonnegut, My side of the mountain, Fight Club, Vurt, Catch-22, Flicker, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything Is Illuminated. I think the last book I read was Searching for Alaska like two years ago. I used to read all the time before college but the I got out of the habit. I also like graphic novels, which reminds me to finish Transmetropolitan... hmm maybe I will get that.
What do you think I should get?
Watchmen if you haven't read it already. Then look up the hubski discussion of it.
Get some poetry. Try Leaves of Grass, or Prufrock and other observations, or Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. I love all three, but the Neruda at the end is my fave, and probably the most digestible.
- T.S. Eliot For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
Since you mention graphic novels in the tag and post, a few that are worth picking up if you haven't already done so: Palestine (Joe Sacco): A really well-done (IMO) look at the situation in Palestine in the early 1990s. Fairly intense and political. Fun Home (Alison Bechdel): Probably one of the most 'literary' graphic novels I've encountered, both in the sense of having a lot of text and using a lot of really neat techniques to convey a pretty great, deeply personal story. I've also heard good things about Persepolis, but haven't read that. Obviously Maus and Watchmen are worth getting if you've not read those yet, though I expect that you probably have.
For $25 you can get both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherent_Vice and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49, I assume.Other books I have enjoyed are Kurt Vonnegut, My side of the mountain, Fight Club, Vurt, Catch-22, Flicker, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything Is Illuminated.
I'm reading Inherent Vice right now. I think it makes a good intro to Pynchon. I tried to start with Gravity's Rainbow, but found the method a little too hard. Vice is great because it isn't constantly uber-Pynchon, but he comes through greatly at times, and the plot is much more straightforward than Gravity's, though by no means straightforward by any other measure.