I just finished Pynchon’s “Lot 49″. I didn’t care for it.

In some ways it reminded me of Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”, but Pynchon doesn’t quite pull it off like Eco does. It also reminded me of the film “Pi” (the one about the mad mathematician who is trying to find the meaning pf the transcendental number). You have the conceit of an unfolding onion of layers leading nowhere, and of a dazzling feast of language and history, but unlike Eco, it just doesn’t seem to ring true for me.

I don’t think I want to plunge into “Gravity’s Rainbow” just yet.

I don’t know about this “post-modernism” thing. I’ve found DeLillo boring, and most of Vonnegut irrelevant (with some notable exceptions).

I feel like I felt after my sampling of Magic Realism. I read with awe “A Hundred Years of Solitude” in Spanish AND English (the English translation by Gregory Rabassa was excellent!) but I didn’t care for anything else by Gabriel Garcia MarqueZ (“Love in the Time of Cholera”, “No One Writes the Colonel”, “The Autumn of the Patriarch”).

OTOH, I really liked Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird”, even though in some ways it was the most disturbing book I’ve ever read.

Who do I like? Phillip Roth and Robert Silverberg. The latter may be “just” science fiction, but I think he has been overlooked because he works in that genre.