I've been reading this over and over again for the past month. My book budget is limited and it gets even better with subsequent readings. It's my second favorite Pynchon, next to
Gravity's Rainbow. That, however, is thicker, pricier, more difficult to read, and never available in used book shops.
The Crying of Lot 49 is a must for anybody into paranoid literature. It practically invented the genre. Pynchon stays a couple steps ahead of the rest of the pack by dazzling the reader with his incredibly esoteric academic knowledge. Check this shiz out. It's short, too.
This is also a reread. I still haven't read the third volume, but again, I'm poor. This is only the second time I've read this, so I have another 50 readings to go before I absorb a good portion of the book. Not quite as epoch-making as the first book, but I don't think that would be a reasonable expectation to have in the first place. I'm not sure if my next Foucault will be the third volume of
The History of Sexuality. For how interesting the subject matter is, today sex has been done to death. I think I'll move back to some of his anti-psychiatric works that are oh-so-relevant in today's society. It's also a school of thought foolishly overlooked these days.
Finally,
I'm two steps away from giving up on this one.
1) Wittgenstein is tooooooough. And this isn't even the more important of the two books he wrote.
2) I really should've gotten a primer for this, or one of the dumbed down versions that edits out portions of Ludwig's more incomprehensible puttering.
3) I don't know about you guys, but I'm beginning to think that atomistic logical positivism may be a pile of horse-shit that has no real bearing on real life. I'm just saying, you know?