The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon)

I finished the book feeling exactly like Oedipa Maas: with some meaning trembling just at the edge of consciousness. Was that on purpose?

Some beautiful prose in this book, as well as some confusing prose (Pynchon really could help us all out with a few more commas, is all I'm saying). The wordplay is fun to spot, naming the radio station KCUF, as a small example, or the word "lot" turning up so many times as kind of a red herring among many.

Basically what I'm getting at here is that the book defies description. Just go read it!

"A number of frail girls...prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world."