The Unknown Comic Posted:

For now, I’m going to suggest The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. It’s around 200 pages and it’s about a woman who’s named the executrix of an old boyfriend’s estate. Soon, she gets caught up in a world of secret societies revolving around an underground postal system. It’s hard to explain, but it’s interesting. Since it’s Pynchon it shouldn’t be hard to find and Amazon has a lot of used copies for under $4.

EDIT: The way I explained this makes Lot 49 sound like some kind of gayer Dan Brown book. It’s in the middle ground between Dan Brown and Umberto Eco. Conspiracies, paranoia, secret societies mixed with LSD, Maxwell’s Demon, and at a few points the book switches to the script of a Jacobean revenge play the main character watches. It’s heavier and smarter than Dan Brown, but lighter and easier to read than Umberto Eco.

I already read that book but would totally do it again. Not because I liked it so much, but to understand it better.