I'm reading All the King's Men and it is pretty good so far, I'm digging it. Every once in a while amidst the dialect that would be best called ignorance, a moment of genius falls out of the sky (or the narrator, either one).

Example:
"The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him."

Chew on that for a bit.