Why has no one been so kind as to inform me that Jonathan Carroll writes books like this? I happened to pick Glass Soup up off the library shelves on a whim, and about half-way into it began wondering how the man could have published fourteen previous books without me having stumbled across them.

Glass Soup defies any quick description. According to it’s rules, the space you inhabit after you die is composed of all the dreams you had when you were living, and the characters who people its pages are as important to the plot when dead as they were when living. Some of them manage to bounce back and forth between the two states.

Title: Glass Soup
Author: Jonathan Carroll
LC Rating:

Jonathan Carroll has created a world where everything is fantastic, but it doesn’t read like fantasy. The world where all this takes place is unmistakably our own, and the motivations of the characters are unmistakably human. While reading I couldn’t quite decide if it was a work of pure genius or just a ripping good read. There are plenty of little moments of what I would almost call philosophical theory at work here, but they don’t seem to encumber the story, nor does the fantasy seem to be a mere prop designed to get a philosophy across.

I wouldn’t call Glass Soup literature; I wouldn’t call it fantasy; I certainly wouldn’t call it a philosophical manifesto; yet it has elements of all of these mixed about in the most interesting of ratios. What I will say is that Glass Soup was one hell of a good read, and now that Jonathan Carroll is on my radar, I can’t wait to see what else the man has to offer.

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