I wrote my undergrad thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the book has stuck with me more than perhaps any other. It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization.
It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
> It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
This is excellent advice, especially for Gravity's Rainbow - I'm certain that a lot of the novel went over my head, but I think even if I'd understood all the references and concepts explored, this is a book that I still wouldn't fully grasp. It actively resists being understood.
I still loved it and got a ton of value out of reading it. There are brilliant sections of prose, amazing imagery, hilarious jokes, and concepts that I think back on all the time.
It took me several aborted attempts to finally finish the thing, because I kept losing the thread, and the logical part of my brain wanted to understand everything. Once I gave up on that and accepted that sometimes I just couldn't understand what was happening or what the relevance of a section was, the book became easier to read, and much more enjoyable.
despite the fact that by reading a text you are actually rewriting it (i.e., borges: "All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare"), maybe reading should be like listening to music: to let it flow through you, at least for the first few readings or so, and then, if you wish, read with a more critical eye
e.g., from finnegan's wake: "The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the sowftzing at the stir of the ver grossO arundo of a long one to midias reeds; and shaes began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing,duusk unto duusk, and it was sas glooming as gloaming could be in the wst of all peacable worlds."
I was grinding through Finnegans wake. Took ages! Dropped my book on the floor of the train one day and the bookmark fell out. Worst day of my life, I couldn't find out where I was up to and just gave up and stopped reading it.
I must have missed this in my reading. Who parallels Stephen or Leo or Molly? Tyrone didn't seem to be to be in search of a father figure or a father figure in search of a son. I enjoyed both books but must have missed the ways in which GR is a post-modern retelling of Ulysses (I saw the post-modern part). It sounds like you've spent a lot more time with it so I'm curious how you saw it.
Motorboats are for people who want to get to the destination, Sailboats are for people who want to enjoy the journey.
It's funny though, James Bond books don't illicit the same ire that Pynchon does and I'd argue the two are very similar - reading between the lines, that is. As another reader mentioned GR was just "yet another scene ending in kinky sex or the characters getting inebriated".
I don't have much of substance to add as I haven't read Gravity's Rainbow yet. Except perhaps that Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino already held the same spot in my mind's eye as the last sentence of your comment. Not difficult like the other two, but seemingly similarly composed and having a similar mark left upon me.
Having read the Odyssey and Ulysses, I don't exactly see it. Slothrop leaves no wife and child, and does not return to family. There are aspects of the Odyssey in it, I guess, the irresistibility of the main character, the ready sacrifice of bit players--but one could say the same of Star Trek.
> It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization.
I've noticed most modern classics that people describe as being about a bunch of themes are usually absurdly overrated.
Most of the really great books, people describe, "It's about this character who..."
Not, "It's a commentary on..."
The first type of book is good, the second type of book usually just panders to an audience and MFAs...
I wrote a paper on Gravity's Rainbow without reading it, and got an A- on it, from which I conclude the professor either had not read my paper, or had not read Gravity's Rainbow. Either are possible. I prefer to believe that nobody has ever actually read Gravity's Rainbow.
I've read the first third of the book, at some point I'll make another attempt. Pynchon's writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get 'sucked into' the book and then it flows. The only person I know that has read through it did so on a road trip and just plowed through without trying to make sense of entire chapters.
Gravity's Rainbow is also more challenging because it spans a lot of different characters and subplots. The Crying of Lot 49 is much easier, and Vineland is an aberration. I know one person who thinks that Pynchon hired a ghost writer for Vineland because the writing style is so different.
I've only ever read the wikipedia summary. And from that much I actually wonder if the professor having read Gravity's Rainbow was more likely to have given your paper an A- than another professor who hadn't. Like the book sounds like if you were to truly understand it then you would no longer understand reality.
And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
I read it but was possessed by a certain motivation that I have never had for another book. Ulysses and Infinite Jest have both beaten me multiple times and I doubt I could finish GR again. It was just a stars aligning moment where headspace and lifestyle and beliefs all combined to make it an enjoyable read.
I read it, decades ago. I have to confess that i skipped some of the dryer parts, so I probably read 80% of it. There were parts that were just amazing, and other parts not so much so. It was well worth it.
I must admit that I have, in fact, actually read Gravity's Rainbow.
On the other hand, I do think it's likely to be high on the list of books most admired by people that read about it instead of reading it...
(Atlas Shrugged is another. In certain business and political circles, the book about the business leaders going on strike to prove how much value they really create sounds like the one you want to cite as your inspiration, but whenever you open it, it just seems like 1000 pages of weirdness about trains, philosopher pirates and genius scions of self-made conquistadors peddling stock scams as an unlikely act of heroism, with drive-by digs at Christianity, marital fidelity and nuclear weapons and an 80 page speech in which the world is inoculated against socialism by the revelation that 'A is A'.
Bet there's lots of high fantasy lovers that loved works influenced by LOTR but never quite got past Tom Bombadil in the actual book too, but then there's others that will know the appendices off by heart!)
In a powerful, if indirect, way Gravity's Rainbow changed my life. The idea that V2 rockets pockmarked London in a Poisson distribution blew my young mind. How could randomness be predicted?! It prompted me later to take a number of courses in statistics and probability, which deeply informed my academic career.
Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.
I think it is notable that I read it when it came out fifty years ago, and haven't re-read it since, but I still remember many scenes vividly - I remember parts of it much better than most books I read back then, or in the years since.
The book is a mosaic, or collage, of a many short pieces ranging from just a few, to several, or many, pages each. They vary from funny and silly to deliberately revolting or horrifying. This mix is very unsettling but I found it effective. Instead of a clear plot or narrative line, all these fragments have a cumulative effect -- this makes the book impossible to summarize.
Scattered amongst the fragments are some with significant mathematical and engineering content. For example there is an explanation of how the onboard V-2
guidance circuits use capacitors to accumulate charge, performing a double integration to calculate distance travelled from acceleration, to determine when to turn off the engine. I found this quite surprising and unusual at the time. I think it still would be today.
A key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting.
Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.
> put it down, and thought, like hundreds of thousands of other readers, I suspect, What The Hell Was That About? Oh, there was a story, there were characters, and it was possible to say what the book was “about” in banal terms. But I didn’t understand it at all.
That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.
This part of the review comes dangerously close to clickbait grifting:
> Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are still in print and read by ordinary people, but somehow the arbiters of literary taste on both sides of the Atlantic decided long ago that Pynchon was Not Serious and so Not of Interest.
The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste. So a book cannot be both “an infinite play space” for an audience while being simultaneously “Not of Interest” to that audience. It can be one, or it can be the other, but it can’t be both.
> The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste
Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so. Professors of literature are a fairly new thing (say one hundred years) while literary taste has been a thing for many hundreds of years. I'd suggest that other/former arbiters of literary taste would include intellectuals, literary salons, the aristocracy, the clergy, other writers, and always too a populist element (books without any appeal to the populace rarely survive to be elevated to the canon).
Bleeding Edge might be of particular interest to the crowd here because it blends perspectives from at least 60 years of engineering, from the slide rules and rolled up sleeves of Pynchon's younger days to open source and web 2.0.
I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
The shorter later novels are not difficult but don't bring the full banquet. I still really enjoy them. As a character my wife and were quite fond of Maxine in Bleeding Edge. I immensely enjoyed Against the Day, which is big enough to get the full effect but not quite as anarchic. As with Ulysses, I hated it when it 'ended'. Keep going, the ride's fantastic! Mason & Dixon has got the dialect problem, which has to be mastered to grok what's going on.
I didn't find The Crying of Lot 49 that difficult. However I am still annoyed after 4 decades I notice post horns too easily.
Bleeding Edge is amazing. I think it gets some flak for being a bit more surface-level than his better known works, but his prose is great as ever and some parts are genuinely chilling.
Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.
> No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...
That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years.
That's completely normal. Rocketry and especially parabolas feature prominently as themes in the book, and the structure of the narrative itself is part of that. The beginning is chaotic, and I think even the fact that many readers will give up on it or require several attempts to get a successful launch, as it were, is intended.
There are some hilarious and memorable scenes that make it a classic for me. Things like the Banana Breakfast were laugh out loud moments for me.
As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
I tried re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey when I moved to Oregon a few years ago. I had read it 20 years ago and loved it, at a time when I plowed through fiction. This time, though, the passages that were clearly written when the acid kicked in were so terrible that I had to move on. Scenes from the dog's perspective (that were also clearly unreasonable, such as the dog associating the feeling of a snake bite with fire, which most dogs have never felt, vs. getting cut or some other feeling that dogs have actually experienced), etc. Cool story, with topical themes in the 2020s, but... we have the internet, we aren't so bored around the house that the opportunity cost to reading this shit is low enough to make it worth it.
And the only thing that might have influenced it more than actual drugs were the drug-infused subcultures of the sixties and early seventies. It's a book nominally about WWII and its immediate aftermath which devotes more time to a subplot where one of the characters going on a road trip to look for a big bag of weed for the cool Germans he's been hanging out with than the resolution of the war...
I bought a stack of Pynchon novels on sale, I've been meaning to work up to Gravity's Rainbow (mostly because of its length, not complexity). I did read "The Crying of Lot 49", but having finished it only a month ago, I'd be hard-pressed to give you a coherent summary of what the hell happened in that book.
Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.
Don't psyche yourself out over it. GR is more challenging and has less of a clear plot than The Crying of Lot 49, but it's still just a book. For a first read, you probably want a very light guide for each section (you can read it before or after each section so you never feel like you've completely lost the plot - I found this one helpful personally)
I imagine I'm not the only person whose strongest association with this book is the reference in "Knives Out":
Benoit Blanc : Harlan's detectives, they dig, they rifle and root. Truffle pigs. I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow.
Marta Cabrera : Gravity's Rainbow.
Benoit Blanc : It's a novel.
Marta Cabrera : Yeah, I know. I haven't read it though.
Benoit Blanc : Neither have I. Nobody has. But I like the title.
my coworker begged me to read gravity's rainbow with him so i did. it was a slog. there are so many nuggets of interesting ideas and brilliant prose but the utter hostility to the reader made it possibly one of my least favorite reads in recent memory. i don't recommend it to anyone.
I never read the book Gravity's Rainbow, but I had an art book that had a drawing for each page of Gravity's Rainbow, which makes me both want to read the book, and certainly not want to read the book,
Read GR yonks ago, and it nearly killed me, but I still remember laughing til I cried at his description of being fed candies by the roommate of the woman he was pursuing. And growing bananas. I have no plans to read it again.
OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.
Gravity’s Rainbow also has a lot to say about race relations (in the 60s in the US) and colonialism. Just saying it Since it hasn’t been mentioned and I’d consider that one of its more important themes.
Another thing not mentioned is the rather casual sex with children, though I think there is some argument on Bianca’s age.
There’s probably a million other themes, odd occurances, extremely long joke setups, and disgusting or offensive passages that haven’t been mentioned.
But my advice is read it with a guide, a reading group, or a podcast (Pynchon in public is one such podcast). And don’t fret over following it closely, or sometimes, at all. You can always read it again. I’m not exactly a Pynchon superfan, I love many of his quirks others hate (the songs, the names) but the long novels are just a bit too much for me. I do think it’s worth a try. You can always quit, it’s a 50 year old novel, not many people are really all that attached to it anymore. Its cultural influence is waning.
Gravity's Rainbow was supposed hard for me to read I thought COVID might have permanently damaged my brain. The whole work has this meandering dream-like quality that only achieves some semblance of a normal narratove for a few moments in the middle (the tip of the parabola I suppose). I would read several paragraphs and wonder how the hell we'd got to wherever we were, because it didn't seem related to where we were a page ago and I couldn't even remember what happened in between. I sometimes feel asleep mere sentences into a reading session. It took me nearly a year to work through.
It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.
[+] [-] newhaus1994|2 years ago|reply
It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
[+] [-] Hasu|2 years ago|reply
This is excellent advice, especially for Gravity's Rainbow - I'm certain that a lot of the novel went over my head, but I think even if I'd understood all the references and concepts explored, this is a book that I still wouldn't fully grasp. It actively resists being understood.
I still loved it and got a ton of value out of reading it. There are brilliant sections of prose, amazing imagery, hilarious jokes, and concepts that I think back on all the time.
It took me several aborted attempts to finally finish the thing, because I kept losing the thread, and the logical part of my brain wanted to understand everything. Once I gave up on that and accepted that sometimes I just couldn't understand what was happening or what the relevance of a section was, the book became easier to read, and much more enjoyable.
[+] [-] 50|2 years ago|reply
despite the fact that by reading a text you are actually rewriting it (i.e., borges: "All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare"), maybe reading should be like listening to music: to let it flow through you, at least for the first few readings or so, and then, if you wish, read with a more critical eye
e.g., from finnegan's wake: "The siss of the whisp of the sigh of the sowftzing at the stir of the ver grossO arundo of a long one to midias reeds; and shaes began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing,duusk unto duusk, and it was sas glooming as gloaming could be in the wst of all peacable worlds."
[+] [-] slothtrop|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salty_biscuits|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] number6|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viscanti|2 years ago|reply
I must have missed this in my reading. Who parallels Stephen or Leo or Molly? Tyrone didn't seem to be to be in search of a father figure or a father figure in search of a son. I enjoyed both books but must have missed the ways in which GR is a post-modern retelling of Ulysses (I saw the post-modern part). It sounds like you've spent a lot more time with it so I'm curious how you saw it.
[+] [-] the_sleaze9|2 years ago|reply
It's funny though, James Bond books don't illicit the same ire that Pynchon does and I'd argue the two are very similar - reading between the lines, that is. As another reader mentioned GR was just "yet another scene ending in kinky sex or the characters getting inebriated".
[+] [-] ghotli|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbariangrunge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|2 years ago|reply
I've noticed most modern classics that people describe as being about a bunch of themes are usually absurdly overrated.
Most of the really great books, people describe, "It's about this character who..."
Not, "It's a commentary on..."
The first type of book is good, the second type of book usually just panders to an audience and MFAs...
[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itronitron|2 years ago|reply
I've read the first third of the book, at some point I'll make another attempt. Pynchon's writing style is rather interesting in that reading it, for me at least, requires dedicated concentration for multiple pages until the point when I get 'sucked into' the book and then it flows. The only person I know that has read through it did so on a road trip and just plowed through without trying to make sense of entire chapters.
Gravity's Rainbow is also more challenging because it spans a lot of different characters and subplots. The Crying of Lot 49 is much easier, and Vineland is an aberration. I know one person who thinks that Pynchon hired a ghost writer for Vineland because the writing style is so different.
[+] [-] Verdex|2 years ago|reply
And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
[+] [-] paddw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mobb_solo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericmcer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|2 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I do think it's likely to be high on the list of books most admired by people that read about it instead of reading it...
(Atlas Shrugged is another. In certain business and political circles, the book about the business leaders going on strike to prove how much value they really create sounds like the one you want to cite as your inspiration, but whenever you open it, it just seems like 1000 pages of weirdness about trains, philosopher pirates and genius scions of self-made conquistadors peddling stock scams as an unlikely act of heroism, with drive-by digs at Christianity, marital fidelity and nuclear weapons and an 80 page speech in which the world is inoculated against socialism by the revelation that 'A is A'.
Bet there's lots of high fantasy lovers that loved works influenced by LOTR but never quite got past Tom Bombadil in the actual book too, but then there's others that will know the appendices off by heart!)
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tatrajim|2 years ago|reply
Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.
[+] [-] jonjacky|2 years ago|reply
The book is a mosaic, or collage, of a many short pieces ranging from just a few, to several, or many, pages each. They vary from funny and silly to deliberately revolting or horrifying. This mix is very unsettling but I found it effective. Instead of a clear plot or narrative line, all these fragments have a cumulative effect -- this makes the book impossible to summarize.
Scattered amongst the fragments are some with significant mathematical and engineering content. For example there is an explanation of how the onboard V-2 guidance circuits use capacitors to accumulate charge, performing a double integration to calculate distance travelled from acceleration, to determine when to turn off the engine. I found this quite surprising and unusual at the time. I think it still would be today.
[+] [-] sergiopreira|2 years ago|reply
A key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting.
Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.
[+] [-] drivers99|2 years ago|reply
That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.
[+] [-] julianeon|2 years ago|reply
> Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are still in print and read by ordinary people, but somehow the arbiters of literary taste on both sides of the Atlantic decided long ago that Pynchon was Not Serious and so Not of Interest.
The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste. So a book cannot be both “an infinite play space” for an audience while being simultaneously “Not of Interest” to that audience. It can be one, or it can be the other, but it can’t be both.
[+] [-] oska|2 years ago|reply
Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so. Professors of literature are a fairly new thing (say one hundred years) while literary taste has been a thing for many hundreds of years. I'd suggest that other/former arbiters of literary taste would include intellectuals, literary salons, the aristocracy, the clergy, other writers, and always too a populist element (books without any appeal to the populace rarely survive to be elevated to the canon).
[+] [-] everly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrumbut|2 years ago|reply
I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
[+] [-] downut|2 years ago|reply
I didn't find The Crying of Lot 49 that difficult. However I am still annoyed after 4 decades I notice post horns too easily.
[+] [-] spondylosaurus|2 years ago|reply
Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.
[+] [-] KyleBrandt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott-smith_us|2 years ago|reply
No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...
[+] [-] nemo44x|2 years ago|reply
That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years.
It's worth it.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smallerfish|2 years ago|reply
What?! GR is very clearly an acid inspired book. Lots of wild ideas and very visual scenes, but I found it tedious to read.
[+] [-] viscanti|2 years ago|reply
As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
[+] [-] cossatot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notahacker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|2 years ago|reply
Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.
[+] [-] viscanti|2 years ago|reply
http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.be...
[+] [-] readthenotes1|2 years ago|reply
it is very re-readable.
i don't remember a thing about it.
[+] [-] saghm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomfunk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rooneymcnibnug|2 years ago|reply
I wrote about a personal connection to this book - also touching on the idea of the preterite and paranoia - here: https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watc...
[+] [-] justinator|2 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gra...
[+] [-] randrus|2 years ago|reply
OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.
[+] [-] hackandthink|2 years ago|reply
Joshua Cohen's "Book of Numbers" feels sometimes pynchonesque.
It's easier to read and set in the 90s.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numb...
[+] [-] uxp100|2 years ago|reply
Another thing not mentioned is the rather casual sex with children, though I think there is some argument on Bianca’s age.
There’s probably a million other themes, odd occurances, extremely long joke setups, and disgusting or offensive passages that haven’t been mentioned.
But my advice is read it with a guide, a reading group, or a podcast (Pynchon in public is one such podcast). And don’t fret over following it closely, or sometimes, at all. You can always read it again. I’m not exactly a Pynchon superfan, I love many of his quirks others hate (the songs, the names) but the long novels are just a bit too much for me. I do think it’s worth a try. You can always quit, it’s a 50 year old novel, not many people are really all that attached to it anymore. Its cultural influence is waning.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|2 years ago|reply
It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.