Apparently all the written works of humanity, in every language, across recorded history, total about fifty Petabytes of data.*
The average daily data traffic for Google amounts to about twenty Petabytes.** Staggering.
So. Welcome to the bloat! (Yes, irony is intended.)

Some books I have recently read, and enjoyed, and recommend:

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe.
"Will you bury him like any other man?" asked the Commissioner.
"We cannot..."
Obierika, who had been gazing steadily at his friend's dangling body, turned suddenly to the District Commissioner and said ferociously: "That man was one of the greatest men in Umuofia. You drove him to kill himself; and now he will be buried like a dog..." He could not say any more. His voice trembled and choked his words.

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy.
The consequences of breaking social conventions around relationships.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers.
"I am at once pitiful and monstrous, I know..."

"What about dignity?

You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it. It's never dignified, always brutal. What's dignified about dying? It's never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it's fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it."

Summertime, J.M. Coetzee.
Must you be a great man to also be a great writer? This, the third part of Coetzee's fictionalised memoirs, scrubs away all traces of romanticism and idealism, but leaves ample ground for empathy. Moving and often darkly funny.

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby.
Love, Life, Relationships, Music and the Modern Man: High Fidelity is a refreshing and somewhat cynical, yet open, perspective on all the former. Highly enjoyable.

The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga.
Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommended. A Black Comedy, reminded me a little of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment crossed mixed with Catcher in the Rye and Darkly Dreaming Dexter. The book seems to have received a small degree of controversy due to its unflattering (and some argue, unbalanced and heavyhanded) portrayal of corruption and oppression in India.

Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee.
An excellent novel based around the complex relationships of oppressor and oppressed, and the shared guilt of people living in complicity with unjust, despotic political systems that flout basic human rights.

Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut.
War. Time travel!

Life of Pi, Yann Martel.
Reality vs the subjective. Animals. Religion, God.

American Rust, Philipp Meyers.
[link]

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess.
Is it a better for people to be free to perpetuate great evil than be forced to do good, to be reduced to mechanical biology?

East of Eden, John Steinbeck.
Very likeable, identifiable-with characters. Lots of pathos and all that too.
"A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar."

The Road ; No Country For Old Men ; Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy.
His writing is spare, vivid, visceral. A rare pleasure.

There are also a bunch of others that I recently read, and either thought ok, or else good, but not necessarily something I would go so far as to recommend. Just my personal opinion. These include: Fiesta: Sun Also Rises, The English Patient, Tender is the Night.

I would also like everyone to know that they can please concrete by walking. In case you were yet to discover this golden nugget.

*/** source: your mother.