The book has two names, the book has two divergent story lines, and it is truly in the spirit of Zen Without Zen Masters. Pelevin aspired to write a Buddhist novel (even the last name of the main character, Pustota, means "emptiness", a fundamental principle in the Mahayana tradition as well as a refutation of the ultimate reality of the individual ego) and may not have entirely succeeded. Still, at the same time, the pop-culture novel with its rampant drug use and its intensely interesting description of a seppuku ceremony, reads like what a novelization of "Pulp Fiction" would have looked like had it been thrown into a blender with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience.

I'm not sure how many of you read it (and we are really going to have to have reminders or announcements a couple of weeks ahead of time about these book club selections to help encourage interest), but it is a fun book. If you have, we're opening the floor for metaphysical pot-induced discussions, mushroom-influenced visions of reality or just criticism about the major ideas of the book.

So please, if you read it, post your thoughts and get the discussion started. If you're reading it, let us know that you're on the way (and it's really the way, not the destination, that matters).