book report

When you travel around the country in a van, exhausting so many miles that you need an oil change every week, I have one piece of advice: bring a book. Lots of them. Regrettedly, I did not recount what I read during the Aiden tour in my blog last time - I think I subconsciously avoided breaking rank with the anti-intellectualism prevalent in rock bands of the past, present, and certainly future.

However, Philip Kindred Dick's sci-fi masterpiece Man in the High Castle, which I finished last tour, raises the question, what if America lost WWII? And to my liking, Dick's dystopic vision of this alternate reality at least at least a couple Jungian references. And after reading about the making of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme record, I learned that you can learn more about God from Coltrane than you can the Bible. So far on this tour, I've read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, a book that ingeniously inverts the idea of the detective fiction genre by creating characters that are writers of crime fiction themselves. The detectives then get obsessivly caught in a trail of mysterious, dark and absurd cases that seem to lead nowhere. Sounds like me when I get hungry. Next is a classic: The Crying of Lot 49.

I know my book report might seem irrelevent and nerdy beyond belief, but sometimes a good book is the only way to conquer the mind-numbing fatigue of staring down the mid-West landscape.