so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

erm, even if the urge *strikes*, that should be. anyway after i finish my MA i swear to every mod on ilx that i will read this mfing novel next summer

we will have a parade in your honor, complete with animated penguin gifs

octopus master of ceremonies

anyway max dude you read the best authors, plz be my pending lit guru, i want you to check on my pynchon and nabokov intake come this time next year with all the assiduity of a coroner, que and velko and sarahel can play too

tbh all i really read is "postmodern fiction" and scandinavian crime novels

and hp lovecraft

i'm trying to remember the last novel i read - i think it was The Financier by Theodore Dreisser. It wasn't all that great, but I did learn about puts, calls, short selling, and various other stock market products, that apparently existed in some form even back then.

crying of lot 49 is nowhere near as good as GR or M&D or IV imho

Interesting. I've read L49 and I am observing IV cautiously from afar. Just read an ambiguous review of it (Bookforum) that had to defend its unsatisfactory aspects as really intentional and the whole point.

is richard powers the kinder gentler pynchon? is he a better writer than pynchon?

did you read james wood's review of richard powers?? i think he would disagree w/ you. it was pretty brutal

still haven't read richard powers. and i've had a copy of 'time of our singing' hanging around since, like, 2003.

He's kindler and gentler, but that's about it.

I don't see much similarity at all between Powers and Pynchon other than perhaps that both write long, ambitious novels. Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable - Pynchon is much the opposite with his wild and woolly prose, love of bad puns, shaggy-dog tangents, and general apathy towards the constraints of realism.

what was tough going about the last 150 pages for you? it's tough going for slothrop too, i guess :/

"I don't see much similarity at all between Powers and Pynchon"

both total braniacs that science majors love who write dense "difficult" books and the occasional 250 page "entertainment".

plus, i can never finish books by either one of them.

"Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable"

you should try operation wandering soul. not any of these things. not that i finished it...

first pages of operation wandering soul here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Operation-Wandering-Soul/Richard-Powers/e/9780060976118#EXC

That review by James Wood stopped me cold.

that's your loss. powers is pretty good, sometimes great.

what do you recc i start with for powers?

That James Wood takedown of Powers is pretty good, but in fairness somebody should link to the recent takedown of Wood.

i think most powers fans would say read galatea 2.2 or the gold bug variations. and i WILL finish operation wandering soul someday. i didn't stop reading it cuz i didn't like it. i forget what happened there...

gain kinda reminded me of steven millhauser a little bit.

"Powers is rather literal-minded, sober, respectable"

you should try operation wandering soul. not any of these things. not that i finished it...

The only Powers I've read is The Echo-Maker, so maybe I'm generalizing too much based on that. I can see how that excerpt of "Operation Wandering Soul" might put one in mind of Pynchon. There's still something subtly different about it, but it's hard to put one's finger on it though. Powers marshals all his literary tricks, scientific knowledge, and dense allusions to give the reader what boils down to a rather literal description of the prosaic act of driving in traffic. At bottom, he's still trying to faithfully describe realistic everyday experience. Whereas I think Pynchon would be more likely to marshal his literary firepower to describe a scene that's patently (and perhaps sophomorically) unrealistic.

ok so this is on my table at home.

Just read the first 20 pages of this in Toronto's Distillery District this weekend. I have six weeks until law school and might try to finish it before classes start.

(My initial goal of Ulysses or Infinite Jest fell by the wayside)

get through the first 200 pages and you're bound to finish it.

Strange to say, I bought a used paperback copy of GR for $1 a few months back, and last night I cracked it open and started it. It was just a taste, after I finished the DFW-interview book by David Lipsky and had a few moments to scrounge around for my next book. Seems ok enough to keep going on it tonight.

am reading this right now (3rd attempt + it seems like this time i'm gonna make it)

i think the threshold is the octopus. once you get there you need to finish.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

this book...

i dunno. the incesty stuff in the middle knocked me out of the book on my first two readthroughs

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow

re: the incest

that was never his daughter btw

Started it yesterday. wish me luck!

I also bought the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I need a good long holiday by the pool.

Weirdly, I also managed to get my hands on The Black Dossier (LOXG) by Alan Moore for light relief, and I'm finding this more difficult than Pynchon so far, then again I'm only a few pages in. Some dudes are gonna get bombed.

The only other long book I've read is Lanark and it's nowhere near as big as this. It took a matter of months - I'm a very slow reader on the whole as I like to re-read sentences and paragraphs and am overtly fussy about skipping words let alone sentences.

I also bought the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I need a good long holiday by the pool.

Surprisingly easy reading for such a big, political book. I really enjoyed it.

http://thomaspynchonfakebook.org/

!

something like my sixth crack at this and, lo this decade gone by, I'm at page 117 and have actually made sense of everything that's happened. I think what stumped me in the past was failing to appreciate that, despite the high blown style, GR is one long fart joke.

I got to ~650 before it pooped out. I just couldn't follow any more, and I got tired of making (increasingly) cobwebbed relational charts to keep track of characters.

keeping track of the characters is really besides the point.

ha i hate the bawdy american college student reptile brain that slithers beneath the sublime geometries

i like mason and dixon a lot, and crying is near perfect as it goes

whoa. dudes, dudes, I just realized.... what if.. we're the punchline?

this is no longer on my table at home, it sits a foot above my head as i sleep, brooding and judging me for failing to tackle it.

I need to take a reading holiday.

rereading Mason & Dixon right now, even more fun the 2nd time through.

Gravity's Rainbow is overrated imo, whereas Crying... and Against The Day are perfection incarnate. Vineland is fun too. I dunno why GR is the canon book when it is a real slog at times.

Never understood those with love for col49. I mean if you're just reading for the texture of the prose, sure. GR has so many amazing parts to it that sort of come and go and wash over you in ways that you can only really get from a large work. I mean I ended up sort of living with it and around for a period more that "reading" it, I think. Which isn't to say I didn't read it (more than once). But just that I stopped expecting it to hang together as a novel pretty quickly, and accepted it more as a structure, like a sculpture or whatever, that you can approach from different directions and see in different configurations.

I like ATD a bunch, but can't imagine calling it "perfection incarnate." Some of the long sections in europe in the latter third of the book lost me way more than GR ever did, and maybe its just because I read it at a different age, but the characters didn't stick with me in the same way, and there are images I remember, but mainly none as haunting as the best from GR or M&D. The one exception being the school essay near the end.

But yeah, GR leaves me reeling more than any other pynchon novel. page-by-page, vineland and inherent vice are maybe as inventive in places, but neither is as thematically ambitious as a whole.

GR also very deliberately teases you, sometimes explicitly ("You will want cause and effect. All right.") with the prospect of pulling together meaning from what's going on, but to a large degree you end up knowing as much (or as little) as the characters themselves, who can only sort of limn a very few contours of whatever complex of conspiracies is operating to send them pinballing around the zone. So it's confusing, but also immersive and revelatory -- cinematic. Vineland maybe has a similar effect at times, but his other works are are maybe less ambitious in this regard.

Which isn't to say the other books are less good, or inferior by some standard. It's just to say that GR is amazing in a very unique way, and I don't know if I'd even want more books doing that exact thing again.

the last time i tried to read 'GR' (for like the sixth time in my life, jesus) i did actually find it funny! it does help to read slowly and try to visualize every single thing happening.

'lot 49' does have a v. different tone and style than anything else by pynchon, IMO -- part of why i like it so much is that oedipa maas is such a believable person. stranded in a universe of terrifying caricatured nightmare-humans. she reminds me a bit of carroll's alice.

GR and V have been my favorites of his--for some reason I have yet to get through M&D. I've tried several times to return to it, and each time I get stuck somewhere and put it down.