Courses this semester are making me want to read and reread
This semester's reading list has me obsessed. From Steven Pinker's *The Language Instinct* to postmodern epics by Thomas Pynchon (*Gravity's Rainbow*) and Don DeLillo (*Underworld*), explore the books and courses making me want to reread every page.
Book
Syntactic Structures (Janua Linguarum Series Minor, Volume 4) (Anua Linguarum Series Minor 4, Series Volume 4)
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Book
Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its complex and richly layered narrative begins a few months after the German's secret V-2 rocket bombs start falling on London. British intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U.S. Army, corresponds identically to a map showing the V-2 impact sites. The implications of this discovery will launch Slothrop on an amazing journey across war-torn Europe, fleeing an international cabal of military-industrial superpowers, in search of the mysterious Rocket 00000. The sprawling, encyclopedic narrative of Gravity's Rainbow -- with its countless subsidiary plots, more than 400 characters, shifting literary styles, and allusions ranging from classical music theory, literature, and military science to comic strips and film -- and the novel's penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
Book
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon
Oedipa Maas finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy.
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The Sot-weed Factor
by John Barth
A parody of life in colonial America relates the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke who became the poet laureate of Maryland.
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Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A finalist for the National Book Award, Don DeLillo's most powerful and riveting novel--"a great American novel, a masterpiece, a thrilling page-turner" (San Francisco Chronicle)--Underworld is about the second half of the twentieth century in America and about two people, an artist and an executive, whose lives intertwine in New York in the fifties and again in the nineties. With cameo appearances by Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, Bobby Thompson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, "this is DeLillo's most affecting novel...a dazzling, phosphorescent work of art" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
Book
The Language Instinct
by Steven Pinker
In this classic study, the world's leading expert on language and the mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about languages: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it envolved. With wit, erudition, and deft use it everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar bats. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America.