Book thread

[jim]

Currently reading this one, and I highly recommend it. I"ve learned a great deal about "Momen". Must read for any baseball fan.

http://www.amazon.com/Clemente-Passion- ... 0743217810

[JackofDiamonds]

Before this thread goes too far into the Dad's porn preference abyss, I'd like to make a course correction.

I am reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49." Anyone else read it before? It's a fever dream. I'm 60 pages in and still can't get a firm grasp on time/space/plot/character in the book.

Yes, I loved it. I think it's a great vision into the grand tradition of the American conspiracy theory, and how our natural curiosity and skepticism and obsessive/compulsive behavior can grow into full on paranoia. By the end of that book I felt just as crazy as the protagonist (I forget her name), and wondered if the mailman was out to get me. I mean, he probably is.

I chose Crying of Lot 49 as an intro to Pynchon because I didn't have time to take on Gravity's Rainbow. But now I think it's time to do that.

Oedipa Maas.

Gravity's Rainbow is phenomenal. It's no less a surreal, fever dream of paranoia, but it's great.

[The Third Man]

Words of advice from somebody who adores GR but had his ass kicked by it several times:

Stick with it. Plenty of stuff just isn't going to make sense, or at least not complete sense. As long as you can get the gist of it and keep track of the major goings-on, you're good.

Read it at a pretty good clip, to help with keeping track of characters/events/chronology. It's too dense to really rush through (unless, like me, you have obscene amounts of spare time and have already read the first half of the book several times), so I'm not suggesting you speed-read or anything, but try and squeeze in a few chapters a day just to stay on track. If you put it down, you're probably screwed. At least I was every time I did.

But it's so so worth it.

[JackofDiamonds]

Words of advice from somebody who adores GR but had his ass kicked by it several times:

Stick with it. Plenty of stuff just isn't going to make sense, or at least not complete sense. As long as you can get the gist of it and keep track of the major goings-on, you're good.

Read it at a pretty good clip, to help with keeping track of characters/events/chronology. It's too dense to really rush through (unless, like me, you have obscene amounts of spare time and have already read the first half of the book several times), so I'm not suggesting you speed-read or anything, but try and squeeze in a few chapters a day just to stay on track. If you put it down, you're probably screwed. At least I was every time I did.

But it's so so worth it.

Those are two great pieces of advice, and they apply to Infinite Jest as well. It's like language immersion, at first you don't understand what's happening at all, by the halfway point, you're conversational, and at the end, you're finally fluent.

[The Third Man]

That's a great analogy, very true of Pynchon in general. By the time I read Mason & Dixon, though hardly possessing the expertise required to truly cohere all its disparate strands into a unified whole (assuming that can even be done - Pynchon is hardly above just throwing out a goofy tale for the hell of it), I was much more qualified to do so because my experience with Gravity's Rainbow and Against the Day (as well as Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, natch). Picking it up and putting it down became a lot easier, as well as making sense of the prose, despite even the anachronistic vernacular.

It's what makes the prospect of rereading Gravity's Rainbow so exciting. Especially since I have Weisenburger's companion book on hand for the next go-round. That can wait, though. I need to work through this sizable stack of unread books first.

[The Third Man]

By the way, for any Pynchon enthusiasts, here's a kickass repository of sources, reviews, essays, analyses, etc. etc.:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/

[JackofDiamonds]

Anyone read the new Eggers? Bought it at the airport on my way home from St. Louis, but I've been studying CFA stuff instead.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

How long has this fifty sheets of grey book been around? I hadn't heard [expletive] about it until our local middle aged (and hot) news anchor tweeted about it and since then it seems I've heard about it 900 times.

[heyzeus]

How long has this fifty sheets of grey book been around? I hadn't heard [expletive] about it until our local middle aged (and hot) news anchor tweeted about it and since then it seems I've heard about it 900 times.

Awhile. It's the DaVinci code, but for horribly written S+M.

[The Third Man]

I hve begun Infinite Jest. 135 pages in, so far it's a lot of fun though of course has yet to cohere into any sort of discernible overarching plot, so I'm just going for the ride. There are too many funny moments to choose from, but the section with Kate Gompert describing what her depression is like was heartbreaking.