So... I'm going to be 33 in April and I've read a lot of great books. I think I'm going to dedicate a huge chunk of this year into reading the most important books in my life. Sometimes a Great Notion is one of those books.
One can use words like "amazing" "enlightening" "sprawling" "heroic" and "pure" to describe this book but it barely gets at it. This book is why I read fiction. Along with other books like Infinite Jest, The Fountainhead, The Sirens of Titan, Bright Lights Big City, and Please Kill Me, this is one of those books that changes how you look at things. If you've had a good psychedelic trip where you turned around your perception and saw the holiness and glory of dirt and death and trees and life and how everything vibrates and you can never unsee it and wouldn't want to, you know what I'm talking about.
I'll be adding to this review as I read it but already I can tell you one thing about this book that makes it so awesome is that there is more going on in one paragraph than most books have in a whole chapter. Don't believe me? read say the first 25 pages of this book. Are you re-reading paragraphs because of the beauty of the language? Are you re-reading sentences because you can't believe he packed so much in? Are you re-reading whole pages to see if there is one... ONE, stray word you could take out? Even the minor things are mindblowing. The way he describes someone with a mustache with a mouthful of nails sticking out as he goes along the side of a plank of wood, hammering. The way he describes a character's smile with four words and you know the whole life story of the character and how they actually are alive.... believe it, bub...