This is a brilliant book by a brilliant writer. Unlike so much contemporary genre fiction in which killers are portrayed as inhuman two-dimensional monsters, Hughes portrays Dix Steele as a human being gone horribly wrong. Though the story is told in third person, we see the world from the killer’s perspective. We occupy his unsteady mind as he becomes increasingly unhinged, and we see how his actions arise from feelings that most people experience as difficult and uncomfortable but that he experiences as intolerable, torturing, and unresolvable.

Reading Wilkie Collins was a revelation to me. How could I have taken so many English Lit. classes and not read this guy? This one starts out with a simple mystery: What happened to the missing jewel? Well, it takes lots of narrators to reach a conclusion, and we get quite a ride along the way. The strength of the book lies in the variety of narrative voices and the rich, compelling characters.

I’ve read many of Greene’s books, and this is the most powerful and intense of the lot. The book follows the travels of a priest on the run from a communist regime that has sworn to abolish religion, and has got rid of every priest in the state, either by execution or by forcing them to marry. The “whiskey priest” is the last in the state. He’s been on the run for years and is wearing down.

Solaris is a planet in a distant galaxy that orbits two suns. The laws of physics say that the planet should have been swallowed up by one of the suns as gravity drew it closer and caused the orbit to descend. Curious as why this hasn’t happened, scientists from Earth send satellites to observe the planet. The satellites find that Solaris is covered entirely by a vast sea, and this sea moves against gravity when it needs to, in order to affect the orbit of the planet.

Back in the 1990’s, I wandered into Twice Sold Tales in Seattle, and the clerk asked if she could help me find anything. I wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, so I said, “How about something dark? That I can’t put down.” She lit up and said, “Oh. Have you read Jim Thompson?” She showed me a shelf of titles from Black Lizard, and I picked Pop. 1280. I studied English in college, and had done plenty of reading, but that was the first book I ever found that I literally could not put down.

This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Williams' writing and insight are far above most of the writers we praise today. He is consistently deep and clear, driving directly to the heart of meaning. When I find books like this–and there are few in the world–it makes me wonder why so many people bother reading all the crap that’s out there. In fact, I had a hard time reading anything for several weeks after finishing this book, because everything else seemed so poor by comparison.

I’ve read a number of Coetzee’s books, and this one is my favorite. It’s been a few years since I read it, but it made quite an impact. It’s not quite as dark as Disgrace. I haven’t read every book out there, but among the ones I’ve read, this and John Williams' Stoner are the two best novels of the late 20th century. This is another one I need to re-read.

I just re-read this this week. What a book! I think this might be Thompson’s best. I forgot how funny it is in places, especially the first few chapters and the chapter near the end with Rose’s tirade about Lennie, which has to be one of the raunchiest things ever printed. How did Thompson get away with that in 1964? This book also happens to be one of the most scathing indictments of Southern small-town life ever written.