My favorite Pynchon book outside of GR, a NYC murder mystery in the shadow of the collapse of the dot-com bubble. Full of complex, flawed characters trying to do their best in spite of paranoia, greed, and bad vibes.
This book beautifully blends fiction and documentary in ways that I hadn’t considered feasible until I read it. Labatut considers what it means for us to have progressed this far as a society through the lens of some of the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th century.
In this book Han Kang explores the Gwangju Massacre and the ways that it has lingered in the collective psyche of Korea since. It is exceptionally effective at bringing a geographically and temporally distant tragedy close to home.