started reading gravity's rainbow

[Vendetta21]

good book. really taxes your attention span to continually follow, but if you can accustom to the abrupt shifts in perspective/setting/"who the fuck's thoughts am i currently reading?" it's not terribly hard and you get there in 50 pages. i didn't really know this existed save for a passing comment on facebook a year back by a nerdy friend who likes thick literature and now i come to find out it's hailed as like one of the last "great American novels"

beautifully written so far. will post in this thread feelings about the book in spoiler tags as i work through this tome. so far i'm impressed with the sprawling, run-on sentence descriptions of mundane things that whimsically capture so much about a character, the story, politics, life, the universe and everything and then move on to the next fleeting description or detail. very comical approachable characters, every element of the story has a certain surreal magic to it.

edit: should probably include a link http://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainb...ty%27s+rainbow

[Netjet!]

The synopsis in the link you posted makes the book sound interesting. Can't wait to see how you like it.

[XCV]

Pynchon is...ugh. I've been trying to read GR for the past couple of years now without much success. I generally get through, say, 100 pages in one sitting, and then I leave it for a few days and am completely confused upon coming back because stream-of-consciousness yay. It's like a mental CrossFit without all the kitsch.

[Vendetta21]

whoa it gets harder to read, whoa it gets way fuckin weirder

cool.

i like the part where there is a flashback with like four to five pages straight of sloproth shitting explosively all over himself in boston amidst racist solipsism (with some sort of Noah's Ark parable) while reliving the memory to some autonomous unknown questioner under what we currently believe to be a mix of heavy drunkeness in the memory and some sort of constantly latent drug lodged in his back but activated by his semen in the top layer of the story. this is going places

[WindowsME]

Originally Posted by XCV

Pynchon is...ugh. I've been trying to read GR for the past couple of years now without much success. I generally get through, say, 100 pages in one sitting, and then I leave it for a few days and am completely confused upon coming back because stream-of-consciousness yay. It's like a mental CrossFit without all the kitsch.

Yeah, I had that problem for a while. I got about 200 pages in and decided I needed the audiobook. Long story short, it made it worse. Eventually, I ended up spending a whole week or so tearing through it. Finished it, now I love it.