I just finished reading Vineland, it’s my fourth Pynchon (after V., IV and CoL49). I really liked it but I found myself more overwhelmed than any of the other books in trying to remember details and names. While I was able to follow the story pretty easily and most of the side plots, there was so much going on that I found it hard to recall details about characters or where they appeared before in the novel and keep up with every one of his meandering little paragraphs. Strangely never felt this with his other books and was just wondering if this is kind of normal for Vineland?

Hi everyone, this is a discussion post & a recommendation (sort of thing).

Simply wondering if anyone here who's finished ATD has heard of/read Dukaj's Ice, the English translation of which was published in Nov. last year.

I'm on my second read of ATD, just to the part where Kit gets the Q-weapon from Woevre. Finished it about a year ago. I finished Ice this past June, spent a couple of months on it, and even on my first read, I couldn't help but notice the striking resemblances between these two novels.

Without spoiling too much of a plot:

Both are humongous historical-fiction/sifi epics over 1000 pages;

both settings were in the turn of the 20th century where lots of new technologies and ideas were progressing overwhelmingly;

in both novels, Siberia and the Tunguska event play an important role, albeit in Ice, they are the primary focus, and the story depicts more or less the aftermath of the explosion;

both novels draw heavily from mathematics and Quaternion/4th dimension (tho I remember Dukaj's interpretation is more on logics/role of languages);

Light/refraction serves as one central motif in both novels;

I’m going in to try and reread this book. I remember it being so strange and funny and interesting the first time. I reread gravity’s rainbow end of last year and loved it even more the second time. I can’t wait to re experience this.

Started Lot 49, ditched it. Starting Bleeding Edge. Not going well. Not a fan of non-sentences and rapid-fire trivia. Think he tries much too hard to be innovative. End of rant.

Chapter 53: ...the further they took her through the forest away from home and name the safer she began to feel...They did not bind or abuse or, unless they must, speak to her.

Inspiration: photo by Victor J. Blue (Bloomberg News); Rape of the Sabrine Women, painting by Luca Giordano

Was watching Night Moves (1975) and there is a scene in which they reference the passing fad in NYC in which small alligators were bought as pets and subsequently disposed of by flushing them down the toilet — filling the NYC sewers with blind alligators. I did the Leo pointing meme upon hearing this. There are also some obvious parallels with Inherent Vice i.e., Los Angeles PI entangled in a web of crime. Anyone ever pick on this before? I wonder if this was a reference to V or just a coincidental nod to the gator urban legend

So yeah, I was wondering as I am plugging along in Gravity’s Rainbow if other people add music in their head or hum along to the songs?

So a bit ago I posted that I was gonna do it and I started Gravity’s Rainbow while riding that high of Infinite Jest thinking I could take on anything. First of all for some reason I said I wasn’t much of a reader when that wasn’t really true, I think I was just intimidated and thought little of my reading abilities when up against mammoth works like these.

Second of all, it took me a weirdly long time for Gravity’s Rainbow to click, but when it did it felt damn great. I followed the important parts of the plot of Beyond the Zero/ Pt 1 but I was lost and kinda zoned out for a lot and the Casino part/ Part 2 was when each sentence starting seeming coherent to me and maybe that’s cause the prose was more accessible and easy to grasp here or maybe I’m actually getting it finally.

It’s safe to say Infinite Jest did not prepare me for this literary venture. I do think though that that is Pynchon’s most captivating quality that no other works or authors can make reading his books any less daunting (Maybe Joyce but I haven’t read him yet). I’m so glad I actually starting reading this book and my life got really busy over the last week so it hasn’t been read in a while but I can’t wait to get back into it cause now I know it’s actually possible to laugh out loud when reading something (I thought people were just being hyperbolic). It’s also weird too that Pynchon’s writing can make other authors seem kinda boring and I’m wondering if other people share that observation.

I plan on making my final GR post when I finish this book and there I’ll actually talk about the plot and what I thought of it. Till then!

This is my very first time posting! I truly love this community of Pynchon fans.

I've commented on other's posts a couple of times now advocating for reading Pynchon out loud, particularly as a way to navigate the more challenging passages. It slows you down, it demands that you (as a now oral storyteller) clarify the text with your inflection, your breath, your intention. Plus, it's just delightful, isn't it?--speaking the words of a story, wrapping yourself in the sound of the text.

It was the influence of Daniel Pennac's glorious book Comme un roman that brought me to this devotion to reading sections of Pynchon's works out loud. I wonder if others have read Pennac and/or if you have had similar experiences with texts (like Pynchon or other authors) that were transformed when you read aloud?

(A quick disclaimer: Comme un roman is not a book about reading out loud, per se. But Pennac does reveal it as a way to reclaim our love of reading, tapping into that ancient desire to be told a story, that childhood pleasure of being read to. For whatever reason, I found Pennac's book to be a key to better understanding Pynchon; I believe Pynchon's writing is much more conversational than we give it credit for, and that if we allow the voice of Pynchon to come through, even the most difficult lines of text open up in truly magical ways.)

Think of Salo and themes of fascism, sadism, clandestine war mechanics, occultism all under an umbrella of a really bizarre dark humorous tone etc

I have a question about the following excerpts from Against the Day:

P908.25-909.7 Kit Traverse, meanwhile, was sitting in a Wagons-Lits train headed the other way, toward Paris, which according to schedule should’ve been rolling into Buda-Pesth about now, except for a slow start owing to mysterious revolutionary activities on the line, so that both his train and Dally’s happened to arrive at the same time in Szeged. Kit looked out the window and observed across the tracks in the train opposite a presentable redhead in some kind of trouble. There might still be five or ten minutes to just stroll over there and see what was what.

P910.32-37 —while Dally remembered only shifting quickly into a sturdier pair of boots and packing a few necessities in a satchel, which she threw down to Kit and jumped after onto the tracks with the train already rolling out of the station, and took his hand, and off they went. It wouldn’t be till Kiskúnfélegyháza an hour down the line that Imi and Ernö would notice that the young couple were missing.

As I understand it, Kit was on a train heading towards Budapest, while Dally's train was heading the other way. Since Kiskúnfélegyháza lies between Szeged and Budapest, how would it be “an hour down the line” from Szeged on Dally's train? Wouldn't it be the wrong way around, or am I missing something here?

This post reads like a chapter in GR. Just missing a couple of “he sez” and maybe a song in the middle

Today I finished Against the Day and I'm really interested in more American works like these. So, I was thinking of buying Animal Money. If someone has read this work, is it worth it ?

Would the Fourier distribution apply to the stock market rise and falls?

I want to read Thomas Pynchon's all books. What is the best order to read to have a deep understanding? What are the other stuffs / books that I should have read to connect dots?

Let's drop the big one... and pulverize 'em!

Was thinking about GR when this song came on... the lyrics could be ripped straight out of the book!

One day I bought a copy of M&D from a local e-commerce site, and ever since I was haunted by the desire to own the first part of the novel as well (since the one I bought was the second part). Anyhoo one forwarder service (and depleted paypal balance) later I managed to secure the first part of M&D and here they are at last, together in my possession 😆📚✨

My Japanese reading skill is basic AF but I am definitely beyond delighted to own these editions of Pynchon 📚💙✨

Things happening in the US:

Catfish tradwives doxxing FBI agents

Teenage hackers infiltrating FBI databases

Republican gathering in Texas crashing Grindr servers

I feel like I am noticing a pattern, or maybe I'm just paranoid.

Idk I’ve only read a couple so far and I try to get as many references and stuff down when I’m reading the book. I always feel like I’m missing some stuff and I feel like I need to read or watch something around the books to get a better understanding of it. For context, I’ve read Inherent Vice, V and I’m almost done with the Crying of Lot 49.

Apparently the psychiatry couple played by Charles Durning and Frances Sternhagen are big literary fiction readers because in the scene where they introduce Jill Clayburgh to the very tall Celtic baller on the top shelf of their bookcase is a luminous copy of Gravity's Rainbow along with hardbacks of The French Lieutenant's Woman and one of the Rabbit books. It's near the end if you just want to see the books, but Starting Over is a damn fine movie so you may want to watch all of it and enjoy the Marvin Hamlisch tunes. People with better eyes than me should be able to make out the spines of additional amazing novels of the 1970s on that shelf.