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Re: What are you reading?

871 by Rocky Rockbottom
llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 6:47 am I started Pynchon’s Against The Day over again and it’s even better the second time around (or third and a half or whatever it is). You get to see Tom’s slights of hand a little easier.

Maybe this is my fav Pynchon.
have had that thing glaring at me from the bookshelf for 15 years now.

I'm about 50 pages into it.

I think I must be reading it "wrong" cos it felt like it drove me half mad and the reading was not enjoyable at all

Re: What are you reading?

872 by llllllllllllllllllll
Rocky Rockbottom wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 1:12 am
llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 6:47 am I started Pynchon’s Against The Day over again and it’s even better the second time around (or third and a half or whatever it is). You get to see Tom’s slights of hand a little easier.

Maybe this is my fav Pynchon.
have had that thing glaring at me from the bookshelf for 15 years now.

I'm about 50 pages into it.

I think I must be reading it "wrong" cos it felt like it drove me half mad and the reading was not enjoyable at all
There are kind of two books happening at once, one with the Chums of Chance on the airship and another on the surface with the Traverse family, Lew, the Rideouts, and the Vibes, etc. Of course they’re constantly meeting and bringing other characters in and out and dropping them, but those are the primaries.

The beginning of the book drops you headlong into it, but the Chums are actually introducing you to characters that will be appearing again for the rest of the book. Granted, they can be hard to identify among all the other characters at the World’s Fair, but they’re there.

I wouldn’t read anything I found a slog, but keep at it and it will pay off. Breeze thru the Chums stuff if you want - a lot of the meat and potatoes plot movements happens with the other characters.

But plot is just one aspect of a Pynchon book, and it isn’t even necessarily the most important thing. Just like when we look back at our lives, we can see through-lines in retrospect, but a lot of times that isn’t readily apparent while you’re in the middle of it. He’s more interested in other aspects of time - major historical points like 9/11 or WWI are important to his books set in those times, but they’re certainly not the whole deal. It’s all the sort of amorphous stuff happening around it that interests him most.

Plenty of fucking and drugs to keep you entertained through Against the Day otherwise, but no good book can be completely understood from cover to cover on one reading. You can’t even expect to get everything out of a good 40 minute album on a singie listen either.

Re: What are you reading?

873 by Rocky Rockbottom
llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Tue Aug 19, 2025 11:39 am
Rocky Rockbottom wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 1:12 am
llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu Aug 14, 2025 6:47 am I started Pynchon’s Against The Day over again and it’s even better the second time around (or third and a half or whatever it is). You get to see Tom’s slights of hand a little easier.

Maybe this is my fav Pynchon.
have had that thing glaring at me from the bookshelf for 15 years now.

I'm about 50 pages into it.

I think I must be reading it "wrong" cos it felt like it drove me half mad and the reading was not enjoyable at all
There are kind of two books happening at once, one with the Chums of Chance on the airship and another on the surface with the Traverse family, Lew, the Rideouts, and the Vibes, etc. Of course they’re constantly meeting and bringing other characters in and out and dropping them, but those are the primaries.

The beginning of the book drops you headlong into it, but the Chums are actually introducing you to characters that will be appearing again for the rest of the book. Granted, they can be hard to identify among all the other characters at the World’s Fair, but they’re there.

I wouldn’t read anything I found a slog, but keep at it and it will pay off. Breeze thru the Chums stuff if you want - a lot of the meat and potatoes plot movements happens with the other characters.

But plot is just one aspect of a Pynchon book, and it isn’t even necessarily the most important thing. Just like when we look back at our lives, we can see through-lines in retrospect, but a lot of times that isn’t readily apparent while you’re in the middle of it. He’s more interested in other aspects of time - major historical points like 9/11 or WWI are important to his books set in those times, but they’re certainly not the whole deal. It’s all the sort of amorphous stuff happening around it that interests him most.

Plenty of fucking and drugs to keep you entertained through Against the Day otherwise, but no good book can be completely understood from cover to cover on one reading. You can’t even expect to get everything out of a good 40 minute album on a singie listen either.
thanks for this.

goddamnit you've got me motivated to give it another burl here.

Re: What are you reading?

876 by llllllllllllllllllll
Thomas Pynchon V. - read a long time ago, happened to see a copy at the bookstore today and got one. I’m pretty sure I already have one but was there with my daughter and got to pg 14 while she was flipping through picture books and thought I better leave with it.

Anyways, its the last great Beat novel, I think. Its like a great, rough-around-the-edges first album that doesn’t really give a hint as to what would come later, but makes perfect sense in retrospect.

It’s beautiful that this was released in the 60s and Tom’s still with us.

All this Pynchon reading is for the new one coming out at the end of the year btw. I did this right around when Cormac died (started because of the release of the last two) and enjoyed it well enough, but Cormac McCarthy is not as good of a writer as Thomas Pynchon.

When C. was on he was great, but there’s something very Tropic Thunder about him. He can’t even write about eating pussy without some kind of bullshit about “kneeling like a genuflecting saint” whereas Tom is obviously having the time of his life on every page and can even work in Bugs Bunny references that are legitimately funny.

Tom fucks and has a good time. Cormac just kind of glowers and you have to buy into his whole thing to get anything out of it. Plus McCarthyite academics are the WORST. Tom it is!

Re: What are you reading?

877 by jimmy spako
I love your Pynchon posts.

I finished Gary Gulman's memoir, Misfit, on vacation. It loses momentum a bit in the second half but delivers on what it sets out to do. A lot of relatable stuff in there. As a father of an 8-year-old boy, for me it served as a helpful reminder of how not to approach parenting, as I'm currently trying to work out to what extent we should strongly nudge the kid to engage with certain activities he resists, or whether I should be doing that at all (the answer increasingly seems to be "no"). Anyways, recommended, especially if you appreciated "The Great Depresh", of course.

Currently reading the last volume of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, taking another crack at Nastassia Martin's In the Eye of the Wild and dipping my toes into Calvino's Mr. Palomar.

Also delving intermittently into Listen – Jeph Jerman in Conversation with Aram Yardumian from Errant Press, a long-form interview with one of my favorite soundartists, based in the US-American Southwest and deeply engaged with activating/exploring its environments. Might be a good one for Derek M. and Dave N. on here, somehow I think you would both be interested.

Re: What are you reading?

880 by Dave N.
Currently reading A Miracle Of Catfish by Larry Brown. I’d heard mixed things about this book, but I’m loving it. The Flannery O’Connor vibes are strong. Dopey rednecks making bad decisions. Larry Brown died after sending in his first draft, so it wasn’t technically finished.

It’s always interesting to me when books spend a lot of time in the workplace. So much of our lives are spent chasing dollars in substandard settings, among people we wouldn’t associate with otherwise. It all seems ripe for good storytelling. A good chunk of Brown’s book takes place in an appliance factory. The Magic of Blood by Dagoberto Gilb is another great book that leans heavily on the workplace, namely construction sites.

I burned through The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You by Neko Case. Great memoir of a fucked up childhood. I wanted to give her a big hug after I finished it. Fun fact- her first show was Sex Mad-era Nomeansno.

I read Grapes of Wrath for the fourth or fifth time in my life, although it had been couple of decades. Depressing, but timely. Now is the time to organize.
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