I'm interested to find that some books seem to speak to one time, to affect me because of some collision of ideas that suddenly makes the book salient in a way it wasn't before. I happened on Zeitgeist after I'd read his (kinda) nonfiction Tomorrow Now (2002), and I'm 2/3 of the way through it. Here are some bits that I just had to put someplace where I could find them later, and maybe later I'll be able to analyze just what it is that bowled me over when I read them. Maybe it has something to do with irony as supreme value (a characterization of the postmodern condition snagged from a book by David Harvey [1990:284ff] that somebody else has checked out at the moment, so I can't get to it to confirm).
"Millennium's almost over now, kid. The narrative is increasingly polyvalent and decentered. It's become, you know, way rhizomatic, and all that." (79)(describing a 4-person pneumatic ultralight aircraft)
The aircraft had been folded up with crazy Swiss neatness, collapsing in on itself with layer after flat waffled layer, like an impossible cross between an Alpine tent and a vacuum-packed box of incontinence diapers. (139)As a first hook he'd told her he would help her with her English. She possessed enough bits and pieces of English to pay rent and to buy Mama's bread and sundries. But she had no real command of North American lingo, and she was never going to get any. There just wasn't any room for the world's biggest and pushiest language inside of her rock-solid head. Everything inside her skull was totally occupied with the tremendous, preternatural effort it took to adjust, oil, lubricate, and maintain her remote interior universe. (144-145)
He swallowed his tequila, and now the booze was on top of him, with that fatal charm of alcohol, that deadly skill the drug had of turning real emotion into sentiment. When you were drunk you knew very well how you felt; the truth welled up from its deepest pits of repression, but the booze bleached the sharpness and the color away, it became the cheap, grainy cartoon version of your anguish. (173