^^I'm intrigued, Chris, and will put Last Night in Twisted River on my list. Over the past couple of years I've been trying to read some books that I read and loved when I was much younger, as well as books I missed but always wanted to read.
Right now I'm reading Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. It's a long book, my edition is over 1400 pages. I've never been bothered by that because I'm a fast reader, but. I think is (by far!) the slowest slog I've ever had through a novel. I don't think it's ever taken me more than a couple of weeks to finish a novel before this, and then only because I was rereading and purposely stretching the time. It's been a month, and it may take me another 6 to finish. I expected to love this, I wanted to love it, but I don't. My thoughts on it are disjointed, because that's what the whole reading experience feels like.
Set in the near future, it's an interesting premise that should feel especially relevant now, taking place after an imagined Limbaugh/Kemp presidential administration. Swaths of the US (which is no longer the US) are toxic, and time itself is for sale--ie: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. The novel is dark, funny, some of the characters are brilliant, it's literary--all things that are normally right up my alley--but. There are some characters that are definitely main characters, centering around a boarding school tennis academy and the family that founded it, and then a nearby halfway house, and then there are also Quebecer wheelchair bound terrorists thrown in, and a video made by the man who founded the academy that is so riveting those that watch it literally watch themselves to death, unable to move away.
Many addicts (using and recovering), and I feel like reading this is equivalent to crawling inside the head of one particularly character, aptly nicknamed Madame Psychosis.
He goes into such torturous detail for everything that I find myself skimming and then going back to reread because I'm certain I missed something important. So far I don't think I have.
Maybe this is one of those novels I would have loved when I was younger but no longer have the "right" mindset for (yanno, too old). My overriding feeling as I read is that I must not be smart enough to recognize the brilliance.