Trippy Book List #2

Need something to really blow your mind? Like plots that make you think? Or just need something interesting to curl up with? Check out this book list....


1) "Uglies" by Scott Westerfeld
A few years after rebel Tally Youngblood took down the uglies/pretties/specials regime, a cultural renaissance swept the world. Now popularity rules. Everyone craves fame—and fifteen-year-old Aya Fuse is no exception. But her face rank of 451,396 is so low, she’s a total nobody. An extra. Aya’s only chance to escape extra-land is to find a big story to kick—something wild and unexpected. Then Aya meets a clique of girls who pull crazy tricks. She knows she can propel herself into celebrity; but at what cost? There’s more at stake than Aya realizes in this spectacular conclusion to the Uglies series.



2) "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.



3) "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami

Japan's most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an account of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.

In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.



4) "The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

The Third Policeman is Flann O'Brien's brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to "Atomic Theory" and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but "sausage-shaped." With the help of his newly found soul named "Joe," he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him.The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, The Third Policeman joins O'Brien's other fiction ( At Swim-Two-Birds, The Poor Mouth, The Hard Life, The Best of Myles, and The Dalkey Archive) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses.



5) "Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs

Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.



6) "Crank" by Ellen Hopkins

Life was good
before I
met
the monster.

After,
life
was great,
At
least

for a little while.
Kristina Snow is the perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble.

Then, Kristina meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild, ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul—her life.



7) "L.A. Success" by Hans C. Freelac
L.A. Success is a quirky comedy that will change the way you see Los Angeles forever. In the black hole of excess and wealth that is Los Angeles, Lonnie Herisson’s life is about to get weird. Forced to find work after his live-in girlfriend stops paying the bills and moves out of his eyesore of a house, Lonnie takes a job house sitting for a private investigator. When a mysterious man arrives looking to hire someone to keep tabs on his supposedly unfaithful lover, Lonnie sees it as a golden opportunity to make easy money. He pretends to be the investigator and takes the case. The job leads Lonnie into the seedy world of L.A. real estate, where his target, chain-smoking nymphomaniac Gertie Elliot, uses a variety of dubious techniques to sell houses. But as he gets deeper into the investigation, he learns that things aren’t as obvious as they appeared to be at the beginning, and that Gertie Elliot is actually linked to the surprising, secret origins of one of Hollywood’s most cherished films. With this new knowledge in hand, Lonnie must find a way to make as much money as possible off of an increasingly complicated situation. Funded by rent money he receives from his mysterious foreign renter and accompanied by his side-kick black poodle, Lonnie navigates his way through blackmail, violence, and epic superficiality as he attempts to straighten out his life, win back his girlfriend, and become an L.A. success.