1. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels. In my opinion, superior to On the Road in both style and content. Kerouac begins with his solitary meditations on Buddhism and life while fire-watching in Washington State, travels through the illusions of fame and recklesness with Allen Ginsberg, depravity with William Burroughs in Tunisia, and comes back home to take his elderly French mother home to live with him. Profound, beautiful, and sincerely conflicted. I wish I had the courage to live like this. 409 pgs.
2. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption. A stunningly poetic and painstakingly crafted work by a Jewish mystical philosopher-theologian who sought to build bridges between Judaism and Christianity, philosophy and religion, while rejecting the excessive claims to truth of all of them. "Truth is not God; God is truth. God is not love; God loves." My new personal motto as an academic student of religion is, "Divine truth is hidden from the one who reaches for it with one hand only." 459 pgs.
3. John Crowley, Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land. Interesting epic/lyrical story-within-a-story about Byron's lost Romantic novel, his dying daughter's encryption and footnoting of it, and its modern recovery by a web programmer whose relationship with her Byronic father is just as complicated. 465 pgs.
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