Secret Shopper Assignment

            I approached the reference desk at the library I choose for this assignment and started simply by casually informing the librarian there that I was looking for a recommendation for a book to read.  The first question I was asked was simply, “what kind of books do you like?”  I informed the librarian that I had recently finished the Walking Dead graphic novels and the second book in the Veronica Mars series, Mr. Kiss and Tell, and that I liked them a great deal. I also told her that I had just finished binging on classic Stephen King novels, which included The Shining, Christine, and The Long Walk, as well as the novellas The Shawshank Redemption and The Body. 

      She asked me if I typically read horror, and I told her that actually, that wasn’t my typical first choice of genre to read. She asked me what was, and I said that I usually go for more literary books.  She asked me what I meant by “literary,” and I mentioned that John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson were probably my favorite authors, mainly because of the language—especially in Thompson’s case—and the unpredictable plotlines and humor in Irving and Vonnegut’s books.  I mentioned that I liked books that were on the dark side, but not necessarily horror, and that Thompson’s book, Hell’s Angels, was one of my favorites.  I mentioned that I also really loved The Electric Kool-Aide Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, because it’s sort of a dark take on Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and I like reading about that decade, and I enjoy books about what people refer to as “the counter culture.”

            At this point she asked me if I’d ever read anything by Thomas Pynchon.  I told her that I hadn’t, but that I had actually always meant to.  Then she suggested a book by Pynchon called Inherent Vice and told me that there was a movie out about it. She gave me a brief plot description: there’s a sort of classic noir setup with a private investigator (like the film Chinatown), except that the investigator is constantly taking drugs which alter what he perceives as real, and it’s set in the late 1960’s in Los Angeles during the time that Ronald Reagan was the Governor and the Charles Manson trial was going on.  I ended up taking it home with me, and I loved it. It was the perfect mix of dark humor and action, it was well paced, and most of the book involves the main character, Doc, exploring the seedy depths of LA counter-culture.  Pynchon also does some interesting things with the language in the book that remind of Virginia Wolfe or William Faulkner—he writes the story in a way in which a lot of the sentences and the different character dialogues kind of blur into each other. It’s hard to explain without reading it, but the overall effect is that everything comes off hazy, and sometimes you don’t know if what is being described is real, or if it’s just the paranoid delusions of a junkie.  Overall, I was very, very pleased with the experience.