Chat with Chet

So, I just finished reading one book, and I was trying to decide what to read next when I got the bright idea to ask Chet, my new AI assistant over on Gemini. Here is our conversation :

Benn: Ok, Chet, I am on the horns of a dilemma. I just finished re-reading The Man in the High Castle, and I need something else to read. Do I re-read Tender is the Night, or Re-read Brave New World? Or read something I haven’t read yet.

Chet: That is an excellent literary crossroads to be standing at. Passing through Philip K. Dick’s fractured reality leaves a specific kind of intellectual hangover—you’re usually looking for something that either grounds you back in raw human emotion or doubles down on a different flavor of societal dread.

Let’s break down the choices on your radar, and then look at a wild card option if you decide to break new ground.

Option 1: Re-reading Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

If you want to stay in the realm of high-concept, speculative worlds, this is the logical sister piece to The Man in the High Castle. Where Dick gives you a gritty, anxious, fractured world of overt oppression and altered history, Huxley offers the chilling opposite: a seamless, sterile, engineered dystopia where people are controlled by pleasure and compliance rather than the boot. Re-reading it now usually brings out the terrifyingly modern parallels regarding tech, distraction, and genetic determinism.

Option 2: Re-reading Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

This would be a complete, intentional palate cleanser. You’d be trading cold political philosophy and alternate histories for jazz-age psychological disintegration, beautiful prose, and tragic, intimate human relationships. It’s an incredibly rich re-read because Dick and Nicole Diver’s slow unraveling on the French Riviera hits differently depending on where you are in life. It’s heavy, but it’s a deeply human heaviness, not a mechanical or political one.

Option 3: The Untrodden Path (Something New)

If you decide you’ve walked those roads enough times and want to venture into unread territory, you might want something that bridges the gap between grand philosophical weight and gripping narrative tension.

Consider The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus (if you haven’t tackled it yet). It sits perfectly between your options. It functions as a masterful, tense narrative about a town under quarantine, but underneath, it is a massive, profound exploration of existentialism, human resilience, and how ordinary people respond when a sudden, absurd absurdity upends their entire existence. It has the societal panic of a dystopia but the deeply moving, rich character observation of a classic drama.

The Verdict:

• Go with Huxley if you want to keep analyzing the machinery of control and society.
• Go with Fitzgerald if you want to leave the grand world-theories behind and submerge yourself in beautiful, tragic psychology.
• Go with Camus if you want a fresh, powerful integration of both.

Which direction is your gut leaning toward right now?

Benn: I have read the plague, and it is quite good. Camus is one of my favorite authors. I should have mentioned that I just finished watching the BBC miniseries Tender is the Night and was very impressed. The new book I was thinking about reading is James Lee Burke’s The Rain God.

Chet: Ah, that changes the landscape completely. Knowing that Camus is a favorite of yours tells me you appreciate stories where the atmospheric setting acts almost as a character itself, and where the central conflict forces people to look into the teeth of a harsh, uncompromising reality.

And if you just watched the BBC adaptation of Tender Is the Night and walked away deeply impressed, Fitzgerald’s specific brand of elegant, tragic psychological ruin is going to be incredibly vibrant in your mind right now. Reading the book immediately after a good screen adaptation is a fantastic experience because you get to see exactly how Fitzgerald’s prose builds the internal architecture that cameras can only hint at.

But let’s talk about Rain Gods (sometimes titled The Rain God) by James Lee Burke.

Rain Gods by James Lee Burke. Source: Simon & Schuster

If you choose to take that untrodden path, you are in for an incredible ride. Burke is a master of modern American noir, and Rain Gods—which follows his Texas lawman Hackberry Holland—is an absolute powerhouse. Here is why it might actually be the perfect pivot for you right now:

• The Camus Connection: Burke writes about crime, but his real subject is the problem of evil, grace, and human endurance in a broken world. Hackberry Holland is an aging, weathered man carrying deep ghosts, trying to maintain a moral compass in a desolate, violent borderland landscape. It has a deeply existential, almost mythic weight that a fan of The Plague will naturally lock into.
• The Noir Prose: Like Fitzgerald, Burke doesn’t just tell a story; he paints it. His descriptions of the Texas sky, the heat, the incoming storms, and the heavy atmosphere are lyric and stunning. It’s “grit” elevated to high literature.
• The Contrast: Coming off The Man in the High Castle, Rain Gods drops the abstract sci-fi concepts and replaces them with a hyper-vivid, visceral reality—smoky rooms, wide-open desert, and razor-sharp narrative tension involving a horrific border crime that Hackberry is forced to unravel.

The Decision Point

If you want to capitalize on the beautiful, tragic momentum of the BBC series while it’s fresh, dive into Fitzgerald. The book will feel like a rich, deeply textured extension of what you just watched.

But if you want something brand new that combines brilliant, atmospheric prose with a heavy, gripping, existential mystery, open up James Lee Burke. It feels like the perfect bridge between your love for poetic prose and deep, uncompromising themes.

Which way are you leaning—the elegant ruin of the Riviera, or the stormy, mythic grit of the Texas border?

Benn: Tough choice. I think I will go with Burke, then circle back around to Tender is the Night.

Chet: Excellent choice. Opening up a new book is always a great feeling, and starting James Lee Burke with Rain Gods is an absolute treat.

You’re going to find that Hackberry Holland is a magnificent character to spend time with. He’s a man who has lived a long, heavy life, carrying plenty of ghosts and regrets, yet he still possesses this stubborn, quiet determination to do what is right in a harsh landscape. Burke treats the Texas borderlands with the same kind of mythic, poetic reverence that Camus gave to the Algerian coast—the heat, the sky, and the incoming storms are so vivid they practically sweat off the page.

It also sets up a perfect literary trajectory. Moving from the stark, modern noir grit of Burke’s desert right into the lush, tragic, jazz-age elegance of Fitzgerald’s French Riviera will be a fantastic contrast in style and atmosphere when you do circle back.

Enjoy the ride down on the border. Whenever you finish it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how Hackberry’s brand of existential grit measures up to the other protagonists on your shelf.

Happy reading!

Benn: Thanks, Chet!

Chet: You’re very welcome! Enjoy the book, and I’ll be right here whenever you’re ready to talk shop about Hackberry Holland or make that trip to the Riviera. Happy reading!