Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (2009) I had read a couple of Thomas Pynchon novels, including Gravity's Rainbow, which was an experience I'll not talk about here. This book is considered Pynchon “lite” by some, I guess, but I think that's a bit snobbish, and also, while more accessible than some of his other books, it's still very dense and fairly impossible to totally get to the bottom of. It's essentially a detective novel set in the 1970s—but it's about much more than the mystery at hand, of course. It's also very funny. It was adapted as a 2014 movie by Paul Thomas Anderson, which follows the book remarkably closely. I read the book, then saw the movie, which I loved, several times, then read the book again. Of course, now the two are forever linked in my mind. I highly recommend either and both to anyone, but as with all movie adaptations of books, you should read the book first. An aside: there is a brief bit in this book, a short conversation, that is almost word for word identical to a bit I wrote in my novel, The Doughnuts (in a part that was taken from a screenplay I wrote a good five years earlier). In the event that anyone ever reads The Doughnuts, they might think I stole it from this novel—but not so! I know that sounds like crazy-person talk, but anyone who knows me knows I'm neither crazy nor a liar. These things happen—but it is very odd.