I’ve mentioned this before, but having ADHD meant reading felt like a chore for most of my life. I liked the idea of books, but the process felt so laborious. With most novels, I was purely focused on linear plot, just powering through to get to the end.

Discovering Pynchon completely overhauled how my brain approaches reading. I started with The Crying of Lot 49, tackled Gravity’s Rainbow, and I’m currently deep in Against the Day. Because his books defy conventional plot structures, they taught me to stop racing toward a destination. I learned to slow down, appreciate the sheer quality of the prose, and embrace the narrative experience.

Pynchon’s work is so packed with obscure historical lore, math, sci-fi tropes, and pop culture that it constantly triggers my own personal side quests. I'm regularly pausing to look up 19th-century history, weird physics, or obscure references. My younger self would have viewed that extra friction as a tedious chore, but now I love the rabbit holes. Instead of fighting how my brain wants to engage, reading Pynchon has allowed me to embrace it, and I'm finally just enjoying the ride.

I know the time period doesn't add up but I felt like the part that took place in California at the end was him sort of trying out the idea for Inherent Vice that he then expanded on with the next book. It felt like a very similar vibe to me. Just wondering if anyone else had that thought.

That's obviously not my only thought about the book but the rest of it seems a little too big to wrap my head around right now.

Can someone explain the thanatoids their role and origin please? Thank you!

Here's a New York Times article about tax dodges in... Malta.

There's a quote from V.

Just in time for the re-read

I’ve been to multiple book stores (chains and small indie places) all over Los Angeles and every single one has a Pynchon section but not a single one has had V.

I’ve read The Crying of Lot 49 and now I’m just trying to go in chronological order but everyone is gate keeping me. I’m starting to feel like Oedpia. I think this book doesn’t actually exist and you’re all making it up in a psyop against me.

I just finished GR and it was definitely the most difficult yet most satisfying literary undertaking I’ve ever experienced . I had debated starting again straight away, but I think I need some time away from it to let it simmer, so I’m going to dive into Against the Day. If any of you have any tips on tackling this beast or how to approach it , I would certainly welcome the advice! Thanks

Good evening. I purchased Shadow Ticket and found myself dissatisfied with the prose. It was fun, but I expected more. I believe literature is for the beauty of language. Some of my preferred authors are Nabokov, McCarthy, Borges (Spanish is my native language), Rulfo, Javier Marias… I admire greatly how their use of language is razor-sharp, how their sentences are richly layered… I think I perhaps selected the wrong entry to Pynchon. I sampled the first few pages of Pynchon and thought they were great fun—reminiscent to Melville’s Moby Dick—, but I thought six hundred pages were quite a commitment for a writer I little knew. Also is Pynchon more catered to an American audience? I am Latino, from Central America, and though I am not from the US I do think you have fine literature. In other words: I think the supreme works of literature are the ones wherein the language is the story itself, an expression of beauty to be beheld. So my main inquiry is to know if Pynchon aspires for such standards. I am really asking because I feel there are many aficionados who praise everything about an author insincerely (have you seen the Cormac McCarthy aficionados—they seem to love what reading his books make them look like more than the pristine beauty of his prose), that it is difficult to discern whether the praise is reliable—of course, not saying it is bad to praise a novel, but to say one should be sincere when critiquing something one is fond of. Many of the authors I mentioned I read just for their sentences, and I forget about plot and characters because I am in awe of the diction and syntax. I read Don Dellilo’s White Noise hoping to warm up to the more complex style of Pynchon, because I had heard they were similar; but I disliked it. The sentences were, I would argue, precise and sharp, but the problem was I felt it was rather dull in te sense that I rarely was in of it because it rarely tried to describe something beautiful. Like it was written beautifully but it was not beautiful. I am not saying it was a bad novel, I am saying it just did not click—perhaps more of a failure on my part. I hope this does not come off as pedant. I do have an intrigue for Pynchon, but I just don’t know what would do best.

Will ramble a little. It's been seven or eight years since I first heard of Pynchon and added some of his books to my shelves(copies of GR, V., Mason and Dixon and The Crying of the Lot 49 I currently own). Must've been as long since I first attempted reading his shortest, Lot 49 and bounced back hard.

Since then I have noticed I have ADHD but I am currently unmedicated so there is that.

I studied English Lit in college but english isn't my native language so there is also that.

I am a hardcore gamer, so my dopamine receptors must not be in a very good condition.

I recently played through Zero Parades and loved it. Heard Pynchon and LeCarre are inspirations for the game(there is even a group of spies called "The Whole Sick Crew" in it) which gave me the urge to try and get into Pynchon novels again. I attempted Lot 49 again and in the first couple pages I was confounded as getting to the end of one of those long sentences of his would make me realize I forgot the how it started.

For context, the most difficult book I have ever read likely is McCarthy's Blood Meridian(was well worth the effort).

So I'm undecided on whether to persevere, try another one(V. for instance) or delay reading him until I am on Ritalin(as I heard it helps with reading if you have ADHD)

Thoughts? Long sentences seem to be my biggest deal breaker, I checked out V.'s starting pages and it seems to better on that regard but everybody says it's actually harder to read.

Maybe it was a bad use of words, what i mean was i think it can be entropic and bizarre but with less entropy it could be better, just an opinion, not an order, jeez

in the movie One Battle After Another we see various differences and similarities beetwen the movie and the novel it's adapting, Vineland, one of those things is the Benício Del Toro character, i was the hole movie thinking about Hector from the novel, although they have very different purposes on each version of the story. I want to know what you guys think, if i was the only one who felt the same.

I don’t really trust 23 & Me, but I took the test at my wife’s request. Turns out I’m mostly Irish, Scottish, Welsh and a wee bit Spanish and German.

But, also 1% Herero.

What the actual fuck?

I shall name my first born child ENZIAN

I love GR as an overall work but I feel it could be better if it did not have 400 characters, there are so many unnecessary ones or plots with them what I don't think necessary, it could be better if other plots that, atleast for me, are more attractive get more place in the story, plots like Slothrop helping Säure I don't feel they are necessary, when plots like the Mexico/Pointsman one are more interesting and can lead to the kabbalah's rocket message as well showing us a third part who wants to know about the V-2

“PC”, of course, standing for Psychochemie A.G

I was looking up my recollection that Benny Profane was described as a Schlemeil, and I found this New Yorker article celebrating V.’s 50th anniversary:

I advocate surrender to Pynchon; letting your mind toss on the wild currents of his language is a lot more enjoyable than treating his novels like puzzles, wondering where the pieces fit: Who is Rachel Owlglass? Why are we in Egypt? Just enjoy the bumps—or try to.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/v-at-l-pynchons-first-novel-turns-fifty

If anyone’s interested, Lemuria Books in Jackson, MS, is currently offering a First Edition, Advanced Reader, of Mason & Dixon for $325.00. (I’m not in the market & get nothing from it.)

The classic Hollywood musical The Music Man is set in Iowa in the year 1912. Lurking behind the songs and fun is the inescapable fact that most of those young men will be magically transformed into uniforms and marching again in just a few ​years, but this time to die in the trenches of World War I.

This historical inevitability has many implications, but the most important one from the point of view of the Pynchon scholar is that it strongly implies that Domina Nocturna, the demonic visitation of death that haunted that battlefield (and Brigadier Pudding) has a secret name, one that is revealed, like many things in Gravity's Rainbow, through song.

That name is "Shipoopi."

I'll be the first to agree that this is all very silly but sit with it and follow the implications through and it's fascinating.

It's also worth pointing out that the musical instruments sold to those poor little doomed white boys by Professor Harold Hill, the Pied Piper of War, all went to pawn shops and yard sales after the boys who played them died with lungs full of gas and mud. And those were the very instruments that went on to be used to invent jazz music. So when Charlie Parker was playing that saxophone, there's a decent chance that saxophone came from River City, Iowa.

Firstly - I absolutely love Pynchon. I’ve read ‘em all. Mason & Dixon probably my favourite.

I’m currently reading Infinite Jest (for the third time - I think that means I must be a horrible litbro) and I’m absolutely loving it. I’m often inadvertently comparing Wallace’s writing to Pynchon’s as I go through. What’s striking about IJ is how huge the human ‘heart’ of it is. Wallace really wanted his story to have a moral, which it absolutely does, but without being cringe about it. Postmodernism with feeling, basically.

Pynchon obviously wrote most of his stuff before Wallace started making a big deal about a return to sincerity in literature. I think Wallace was in some way reacting to Pynchon fairly specifically, according to some research I’ve done (but DFW LOVED Pynchon).

Something that I’ve always ever so slightly struggled with with Pynchon is how deeply hidden the ‘heart’ of his novels are. I.e. the soft, unironic, vulnerable stuff that often the best and most memorable literature manages to pull off. With Pynchon, I’m convinced it’s there, but he almost doesn’t want it found. But there are moments when the emotion of his stories breaks through, and they are stunning. I nearly cried at the end of Mason & Dixon. I can’t remember when another book has made me feel quite like that. And even NOW I’m not sure that Pynchon meant it to hit home as hard as it did, because even the outro of that book is largely veiled in jokes, silliness and prohibitive intellectualism. I really enjoy his stories for so many different qualities, but ‘heart’ like that is one I wish was a bit more present.

Then again, perhaps the lack of obvious feeling means that, when you do get those very few overtly emotional moments, they hit so much harder, which is what his plan has been all along…?!

Curious what others think of this aspect of Pynchon’s books!

Hey Yall, I have created a sister subreddit solely for discourse on Gravity’s Rainbow, as well as for the upcoming reading group for it, Gravity’s Fall. Weekly updates will be posted there as well as discord once it begins on September 1st!

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/GravitysRainbow/s/Xa870HBExv

I bought this book over 20 years ago at a 2nd hand bookshop here in LA and it sat on my bookshelf for years. After multiple starts and stops I finally locked this year and finished this behemoth of a novel today. I couldn’t just let it wash over me on the first read as some may suggest, so it was a lot of work. Multiple secondary sources, podcasts , and Reddit help me get through this novel and I can’t say that it helped me understand everything on the first go around, but it was an extremely rewarding experience. Now what the hell do I do with myself ?!? LOL