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Sue's Reviews > Against the Day
Against the Day
by
by
Sue's review
bookshelves: historical-fiction, books-read-from-my-tbr-list-2017, my-own-books-2017
Dec 02, 2011
bookshelves: historical-fiction, books-read-from-my-tbr-list-2017, my-own-books-2017
An amazing book, describing a time of turmoil and discovery, showing the best and worst of mankind and individual men and women. This multifaceted story begins at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and ends after the world altering events of World War I. The world is moving into new areas; armies on horseback are giving way to men with machine guns. The wide open West of the United States is being increasingly hemmed in by wealthy industrialists who hire "goons" with guns to break strikes. In Europe, the structure of the continent is changed by the outcome of WWI. And against this background, there is a large cast of characters living big lives. Anarchists around the globe strike out against those that would control them.
Then there are the metaphorical levels of the book.. Here the major motif is light in its many forms and applications: natural, man-made, possibly supernatural. Mentions of light occur constantly and light is the subject of some characters's work. Time and space also are constantly considered; I.e. slipping in and out of present time or space, etc. If the book were a bit shorter, I might consider a re-read to track these themes. One of the most spectacular instances of light is that of the Tunguska Event which unnerved people in a large swath of the world for some time.
As I neared the end, I began to think about the broad themes of this book: light (? as an entity in itself, as a force), light vs darkness, anarchy and anarchists, power, evil, war, money behind most evil and only limited good. And the characters, well they are geniuses and dummies, killer's and serial lovers, anarchists and strikebreakers, millionaires and peasants, dreamers and realists.... In short, they are all of humanity and some who may not be of this world.
Like Mason & Dixon, the other Pynchon book I've read (and recommend) Against the Day is historical fiction, fantasy, sci fi, a picture of a world on the brink of massive change--economically, politically, in the military, scientifically, geopolitically, essentially in almost every way. The only difference is the century. Pynchon has given us a work that in some ways is indescribable but is a wonder to read. As I have said before, I will readily admit: I do not understand much of it, but that didn't interfere with my enjoyment.
Then there are the metaphorical levels of the book.. Here the major motif is light in its many forms and applications: natural, man-made, possibly supernatural. Mentions of light occur constantly and light is the subject of some characters's work. Time and space also are constantly considered; I.e. slipping in and out of present time or space, etc. If the book were a bit shorter, I might consider a re-read to track these themes. One of the most spectacular instances of light is that of the Tunguska Event which unnerved people in a large swath of the world for some time.
As I neared the end, I began to think about the broad themes of this book: light (? as an entity in itself, as a force), light vs darkness, anarchy and anarchists, power, evil, war, money behind most evil and only limited good. And the characters, well they are geniuses and dummies, killer's and serial lovers, anarchists and strikebreakers, millionaires and peasants, dreamers and realists.... In short, they are all of humanity and some who may not be of this world.
Like Mason & Dixon, the other Pynchon book I've read (and recommend) Against the Day is historical fiction, fantasy, sci fi, a picture of a world on the brink of massive change--economically, politically, in the military, scientifically, geopolitically, essentially in almost every way. The only difference is the century. Pynchon has given us a work that in some ways is indescribable but is a wonder to read. As I have said before, I will readily admit: I do not understand much of it, but that didn't interfere with my enjoyment.
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Reading Progress
December 2, 2011
– Shelved
December 2, 2011
– Shelved as:
historical-fiction
September 24, 2015
– Shelved as:
to-read
December 21, 2015
–
Started Reading
December 25, 2015
–
2.03%
"A Zulu theatrical company re-enacted the massacre of British troops at Isandhlwana. Pygmies sang Christian hymns in the Pygmy dialect, Jewish klezmer ensembles filled the night with unearthly clarionet solos, Brazilian Indians allowed themselves to be swallowed by giant anacondas, only to climb out again, undigested and apparently with no discomfort to the snake. Indian swamis levitate, Chinese boxers fronted..."
page
22
December 29, 2015
–
2.95%
""You are a socialist, sir." "As anyone not insulated by wealth from the cares of the day is obliged to be. Sir.""
page
32
January 4, 2016
–
5.81%
""What I worry about," said Roswell at last, "is that the Aether will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?" "Unless," Ed pointed out, "it is God." Somehow this escalated into a general free-for-all, in which furniture and glassware didn't come out much better than the human participants, a rare sort of behavior among Aetherists...."
page
63
January 4, 2016
–
6.45%
"The skies were interrupted by dark gray storm clouds with a flow like molten stone, swept and liquid, and light that found its way through them was lost in the dark fields but gathered shining along the pale road, so that sometimes all you could see was the road, and the horizon it ran to."
page
70
January 18, 2016
–
6.82%
"Berry vines crept in the crevices, and spiders adorned the sashwork with webs that when the early daylight was right could cause you to stand there just stupified."
page
74
January 30, 2016
–
11.15%
"As the Era of Sail had depended on the mapping of seas..., so upon the measurement of newer variables would depend the history that was to pass up here, among the reefs of magnetic anomaly...storms of rays yet unnamed lashing out of the sun.... Here at the high edge of the atmosphere was the next untamed frontier, pioneers arriving in airships instead of wagons..."
page
121
January 30, 2016
–
11.71%
"Tales survived here from the first millennium, the first small pack of outlaws on the run, not yet come to be haunted by any promise of Christ's return, thinking only of the ax-bearing avengers at their backs, setting off westward, suicidally cheerful, almost careless...tales of Harald the Ruthless, son of King Sigurd, sailing away north..farther away each sunset from all comfort, all kindness..."
page
127
February 24, 2016
–
15.21%
"Fleetwood stood...shaking his head slowly. "There are stories, like maps that agree....too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.....It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it...." "Home""
page
165
February 25, 2016
–
16.22%
"The altitude, the scale of the country out here, put a balloonheaded clarity onto vision when directed at mine owners and workers alike, revealing the Plutonic powers as they daily sent their legions of gnomes underground to hollow out as much of that broken domain as they could before the overburden collapsed...though what did it matter to the Powers, who always had more dwarves waiting...to be sent below."
page
176
April 30, 2016
–
21.84%
"This person greeted the Cohen by raising his left hand, then spreading the fingers two and two away from the thumb so as to form the Hebrew letter "shin", signifying the initial letter of one of the pre-Mosaic (that is, plural) names of God, which may never be spoken. "Basically wishing long life and prosperity," explained the Cohen, answering with the same gesture. [who knew Spock was there!]"
page
237
May 10, 2016
–
23.04%
""...if one accepts the idea that maps begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again, we may say that these paramorphoscopes of Iceland spar, which cannot exist in great numbers if at all, reveal the architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude....""
page
250
May 30, 2016
–
25.71%
"Frank could see that Wren had arrived..here after unnumbered miles and Stations of the Cross..her face was.. that of a searcher..who had come..to ask what he would be least willing to answer. He understood that there were such presences abroad in the world, and that although one may live an entire life without intersecting one, if it should happen, it became a solemn obligation to speak when spoken to."
page
279
May 31, 2016
–
25.9%
"The high country darkness...soon gave way to an unholy radiance ahead, in the east. It was the wrong color for a fire, and daybreak was out of the question, though the end of the world remained a possibility. It was in fact the famous electric street-light hmm"
page
281
May 31, 2016
–
25.9%
"(cont) street-lighting of Telluride, first city in the U.S. to be so lit."
page
281
July 21, 2016
–
27.37%
"..Frank, who was not what you'd call one of these spiritualist, could tell that it was haunted up here. Despite the day-and-night commercial bustling down below, the...promise of desire unleashed, you only had to climb the hillside for less than an hour to find the brown, slumped skeletons of cabins .nobody would occupy again...the presences that moved quickly as marmots at the edges of the visible."
page
297
July 24, 2016
–
29.77%
"As relations with Scarsdale Vibe had dwindled to yearly..head-insertions into Sloane Lab and eventually..to none at all...Vanderjuice began to think that...he'd detected...at the far edges of his visual field, a glimmering winged object among the..stonework and the rippling elms, and there grew upon him the curious notion that this might actually be his soul, whose..whereabouts since 1893 had been in some doubt."
page
323
July 24, 2016
–
30.51%
"...the shape of it was clear. Scarsdale Vibe at this pitch of things would feel just as comfortable as Kit would with an ocean between them, and willing to pay first-class rates if he had to, to put it there. So back in '63 had he paid not to have to go and fight--so had he continued to pay for the elimination from his life of many forms of inconvenience, including--what doubt could remain?...Webb Traverse."
page
331
July 28, 2016
–
32.17%
"From the roof garden, past soiled masses of gray and brown shadow, past the gaslit windows and streetlamps in unrecognized vigil below the elevated tracks, far uptown the illuminated city ascended against a deep indigo sky as if night up there had somehow neglected to fall, sparing it in its golden dream of lighted facades."
page
349
July 30, 2016
–
34.75%
"They climbed up the..mountainside...till they were high enough to see, beneath the harsh radiance of the Good Friday sky, where cirrus clouds were blown to long, fine parallel streaks, the city below...stunned as if by mysterious rays to a silence even Frank and Ewball must honor--the passion of Christ, the windless hush...even the Silver itself...taking its day of rest, as if to recognize the price Judas..received."
page
377
August 26, 2016
–
37.14%
"The multitude extended farther than they could see--a spectral cavalry, faces disquietingly wanting in detail.. Were those voices out there crying in pain? sometimes it almost sounded like singing. Sometimes a word or two, in a language almost recognizable...Thus, galloping in unceasing flow ever ahead...the disconsolate company was borne..over the edge of the visible world..."
page
403
August 28, 2016
–
38.99%
"...when the "real" Chums flew away, the boys were left to the uncertain sanctuary of the Harmonica Marching Band Training Academy. . . .But life on the surface kept on taking its usual fees...while the other Chums remained merrily aloft... And some would drift away...into the smoke and confusion of urban densities...to join other...playing music of ..newer races,..Negro blues, Polish polkas, Jewish klezmer..."
page
423
August 28, 2016
–
39.72%
"Lindsay...[was]…studying historic world battles, attempting to learn what lighting conditions might have been like during the action...coming to suspect that light might be a secret determinant of history--beyond how it had lit a battlefield or an opposing fleet, how might it have come warping through a particular window during a critical assembly of state...."
page
431
August 30, 2016
–
41.47%
"He noticed that, like a lot of these country theaters, this one had been converted from a church of some persuasion too small at last to support a minister. Made sense to Merle, who didn't see much difference between movie audiences and crowds at tent-meetings---it was the same readiness to be carried into some storyteller's spell."
page
450
September 19, 2016
–
42.95%
""My ministry." He nodded to include somehow the whole off-shift population. "These Austrian boys that look so easy and obligin right now will come back as vengeful ghosts to haunt Colorado someday, because it is law universal as the law of Gravity and as unforgiving that today's scab is tomorrow's striker. Nothin mystical. Just what happens.""
page
466
October 1, 2016
–
47.1%
"Kit found himself once again gazing across the saloon at a young woman with a striking head of red hair... The young woman was at once there and somewhere else. Kit knew he'd seen her someplace. It itched at the corners of his memory. No, it was a little more supernatural than that. They knew each other, it's almost as if he had dreamed it once...."
page
511
October 1, 2016
–
47.56%
"From what Root had been able to learn earlier, the passenger liner Stupendica, this peaceful expression of high-bourgeois luxury, had been constructed in Trieste... At the same time...also in Trieste...the Austrian navy had apparently been building their dreadnought Emperor Maximilian. At some point...the two projects...merged. How?...No one was quite sure...one day there was only the single ship."
page
516
October 1, 2016
–
48.66%
""Has anyone noticed...how many assorted figures of power in Europe--Kings, Queens, Grand Dukes, Ministers--have been going down lately beneath the implacable Juggernaut of History? corpses of the powerful toppling in every direction, with a frequency far higher than chance might suggest?""
page
528
October 2, 2016
–
49.95%
"Could it matter who spied for whom? The ruling families of Europe, related by blood and marriage, inhabited their single great incestuous pretense of power, bickering without end--the state bureaucracies, the armies, the Churches, the bourgeoisie, the workers, all were incarcerated within the game...."
page
542
October 4, 2016
–
51.06%
""Ten years from now...Damn you, Blundell... You have no idea what you're heading into... Flanders will be the mass grave of history... On a scale that has never yet been imagined. Not some religious painting in a cathedral, not Bosch, or Brueghel, but this, what you see, the great plain, turned over and harrowed...--deliberately flooded, not the sea...but human counterpart....""
page
554
October 31, 2016
–
57.88%
""How much do you know of Shambhala, Kit?" He turned his head, peered at her out of one eye... "May have heard the place mentioned once or twice." "An ancient metropolis of the spiritual, some say inhabited by the living, others say empty, in ruins, buried someplace beneath the desert sands of Inner Asia. And of course there are always those who'll tell you that the true Shambhala lies within.""
page
628
November 2, 2016
–
58.53%
"They moved along in regret and reluctance, feeling through the ponderous stone envelope the afternoon as it deepened. Back in town waited another evening in its coercive penultimacy, and yet none could quite suggest detaching from these corridors commemorative of the persons they had once imagined themselves to be..."
page
635
November 3, 2016
–
60.28%
"Among the many superstitions inside this mountain was a belief that the tunnel was "neutral ground," exempt not only from political jurisdictions but from Time itself. The Anarchists and Socialists on the shift had their own mixed feelings about history. They suffered from it, and it was also to be their liberator, if they could somehow survive to see the day."
page
654
November 5, 2016
–
63.32%
"..the Cohen said, "We are light..all of light..we are the light offered the batsman at the end of the day, the shining eyes of the beloved...the stars and nebulae in full midnight glory... When we lost our aethereal being and became embodied, we slowed, thickened...to"--grabbing each side of his face..."this. The soul itself is a memory we carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light.""
page
687
November 13, 2016
–
68.02%
"...the topic under discussion was Scarsdale Vibe, as the latest in a series of American millionaires who had come here with designs against Venetian art. "The newspapers like to call it 'spoils of war,'" declared Tancredi, "as if it is only some metaphorical struggle, with large dollar sums replacing casualty figures...but...the same people carry on a campaign of extermination against art itself."
page
738
November 13, 2016
–
68.85%
"He was gazing at her as if having...glimpsed the simple longitude of what he was about to do....so...they only stood there, curtains of Venetian mist between them...and both young people understood a profound opening of distinction between those who would be here, exactly here day after tomorrow...and those stepping off the night precipice of this journey, who would never be here, never exactly here, again."
page
747
December 26, 2016
–
70.51%
""How will I find...the one you prepare the way for?" "I will send with you my loyal lieutenant Hassan, who will help you through the fearful Gates and past those who guard them.... It isn't only the difficult terrain...vipers...sandstorms and raiding parties. The journey itself is a kind of conscious Being, a living deity who does not wish to engage with the foolish or the weak, and hence will try to dissuade you.""
page
765
December 26, 2016
–
70.78%
"There are places we fear, places we dream, places whose exiles we became and never learned it until, sometimes, too late."
page
768
December 28, 2016
–
72.07%
"..with no announcement, everything, faces, sky, trees..went red. Sound itself, the wind...all gone red as a living heart. Before they could regain their voices, as the color faded to a blood orange, the explosion arrived, the voice of a world announcing that it would never go back to what it had been."
page
782
December 31, 2016
–
72.72%
"I had hoped to finish this book by year's end but didn't succeed. Just can't hurry through Pynchon and this has been a broken up reading year. Hopefully, I can attend to it better in coming weeks. I still enjoy it and find it amazing."
page
789
January 4, 2017
– Shelved as:
books-read-from-my-tbr-list-2017
January 21, 2017
–
73.09%
""Shambhala," cried Miles, and...they all knew. For centuries the sacred City had lain invisible, cloaked in everyday light, sun-, star-, and moonlight...campfires and electric torches of desert explorers, until the Event over the Stony Tunguska, as if those precise light-frequencies which would allow human eyes to see the City had finally been released."
page
793
March 20, 2017
–
73.36%
"Slowly as God's justice, reports began arriving out of the East...as if the countless tiny engagements of an unacknowledged war had at last been expressed as a single explosion, in an almost-musical crescendo of a majesty usually encountered only in dreams."
page
796
March 20, 2017
–
73.46%
"...Was it Tchernobyl, the star of Revelation? An unprecedented harrowing of the steppe by cavalry in untold millions, flooding westward in a simultaneous advance? German artillery of a secret design... Or something which had not quite happened yet... Was it, to be blunt, the general war which Europe this summer and autumn would stand at the threshold of, collapsed into a single event?"
page
797
March 20, 2017
–
74.19%
"As nights went on and nothing happened and the phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucinations, stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the day."
page
805
May 5, 2017
–
74.38%
"Jewish pig? For a moment she was too bewildered to see it. Vienna had been anti-Semitic forever, of course...since 1897 officially so.... Hatred of the Jew was sometimes almost beside the point. Modern anti-Semitism really went far beyond feelings, had become a source of energy, tremendous dark energy that could be tapped in to like an electric main for specific purposes, a way to a political career...."
page
807
May 5, 2017
–
75.67%
"Cyprian, embarking from the Molo San Carlo on the Austrian Lloyd express steamer John of Asia, found the decks aswarm with butterfly-hunters, bird-watchers, widows and divorcees, photographers, school-girls and their guardians, all of whom, without undue exercise of the of the organs of fantasy, might be supposed foreign spies..."
page
821
May 6, 2017
–
78.06%
"...Captain, sitting across a table from the cooing couple...at great personal effort keeping his expression free of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation, dropping from the sky like pigeon s**t, namely that Love, which people like Bevis and Jacintha no doubt imagined as a single Force at large in the world, was in fact more like the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the Hindu..."
page
847
June 2, 2017
–
82.58%
"The moment Vaughan Williams raised his baton...something happened to Ruperta. As Phrygian resonances swept the great nave, doubled strings sang back and forth, and nine-part harmonies occupied the bones and blood vessels of those in attendance, very slowly Ruperta began to levitate, nothing vulgar, simply a tactful and stately ascent about half way to the vaulting...."
page
896
June 4, 2017
–
84.24%
"The operetta, all the rage in Vienna at the moment, was called The Burgher King, in which the ruler of a fictional country in Central Europe, feeling disconnected from his people, decides to go out among them disguised as a member of the urban middle class."
page
914
June 10, 2017
–
85.53%
"He understood for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains."
page
928
June 10, 2017
–
85.99%
""And sometimes," the hopefulness in Reef's voice obvious to all, "you'll also...blow something up?" "Not often. We've chosen more of a coevolutionary role, helping along what's already in progress." "Which is what again?" "The replacement of governments by other, more practical arrangements," Ratty replied, "some in existence, others beginning to emerge, when possible working across national boundaries.""
page
933
June 20, 2017
–
86.73%
"..the idea..was for them to be deployed into Thrace among a party of less than worldly song-gatherers, out late in the European twilight, far from safety...But there was also an urgency abroad which no one in the field would speak of, as if...the work had to be done quickly, before each people's heritage of song was somehow lost for good."
page
941
June 25, 2017
–
87.37%
"Even to the indigenous, used to twittering fools from the north and west in tourist attire, the three seemed gravely passionate, as if behaving not as they wished but as they must, in answer to unheard voices of duty.... what were they doing out here this late in history? when everyone else had long turned, withdrawn, re-entered the harsh certainties of homelands farther west, were preparing or prepared...."
page
948
June 25, 2017
–
88.29%
""It may be," Cyprian said as gently as he thought he had to, "that God doesn't always require us to wander about. It may be that sometimes there is a--would you say a 'convergence' to a kind of stillness, not merely in space but in Time as well?""
page
958
June 25, 2017
–
88.76%
"They made their way up off the Plain of Thrace...over toward Macedonia. Some days the light was pitiless. Light so saturated with color, brought hovering to such tension, that it could not be borne for long, as if it were dangerous to be out in country filled with light like this, ad if anyone beneath it were just about to be taken by it, if not over into death then some transformation at least as severe."
page
963
June 25, 2017
–
88.94%
"One morning at first light they awoke into a firefight the likes of which few out here had ever encountered and would never have expected in this antiquated world of bolt-action weaponry. Among the frantic popping of Mauser against Mauser, something new on earth. Machine guns, the future of warfare... It was the devastation and final descent of the Ottoman project, the centuries of Turkey in Europe..."
page
965
June 25, 2017
–
91.34%
"...at some point Frank came to understand that this bearer of light was his soul, and that all the fireflies in the tree were the souls of everyone who had ever passed through his life, even at a distance... that there existed such a tree for each person in Chiapas, and though this suggested the same soul must live on a number of trees, they all went to make up a single soul...in the same way..light was indivisible."
page
991
June 26, 2017
–
94.1%
"as I near the end, I am thinking about the broad themes of this book: light (? as an entity in itself, as a force), light vs darkness, anarchy and anarchists, power, evil, war, money behind most evil and only limited good. And the characters, well they are geniuses and dummies, killer's and serial lovers, anarchists and strikebreakers, millionaires and peasants, dreamers and realists....."
page
1021
June 27, 2017
–
94.56%
"Since 1916 there had been agreements in effect among Britain, Germany and France allowing severely wounded prisoners of war to be exchanged and returned to their home countries by way of Switzerland, while those less seriously disabled could be interned under Swiss custody.... Whenever the trains paused...citizens appeared...with flowers...bottles of homemade schnapps, chocolate..."
page
1026
June 28, 2017
–
94.65%
"One morning...Geneva...was washed in a strangely circumspect light. Birds had long been up and about, but discreetly so. Lake steamers refrained from blowing their sirens. Tram cars seemed to ride on pneumatic wheels. A supernatural hush hung over the steeples, the mountains, the known world... Toward noon the bell of the Cathedral...began to ring. Back in Europe something called an armistice had taken effect."
page
1027
June 29, 2017
–
95.58%
"In the years since they'd come up with the process, Merle confided, he had begun to understand that he was on a mission to set free the images not just in the photographs he was taking, but in all that came his way... One by one, across the land...photos trembled, stirred, began to move...pedestrians walked away out of the frame, streets darkened and gas lamps came on...stars wheeled...we're dissolved in dawn.."
page
1037
June 29, 2017
–
96.13%
"It was in the days just before the earthquake, and Santa Barbara still reflected a lot less light than it was about to under the stucco-and-beam philosophy of the rebuilding to follow. The place for the moment lay dreaming in a darkness of overwatered vegetation, ivy-shrouded suburban ascents into rat-infested pockets of old California money, a relentlessly unacknowledged past."
page
1043
June 29, 2017
–
97.7%
"Amid a technical environment so corrupted by less-than-elevated motives, usually mercenary, for "setting forth against the Enemy Wind" (as early epics of time-travel described it), there must now and then appear one compassionate time-machine story, time travel in the name of love, with no expectation of success, let alone reward."
page
1060
June 29, 2017
–
100.0%
"Such an amazing book. I won't profess to understanding it all, but that doesn't bother me at all. This is a work to experience as much as to read. Understanding exists on many levels. I think I may have caught some of the metaphorical ones and am quite ok with not getting them all. What a mind has Mr Pynchon."
page
1085
June 29, 2017
– Shelved as:
my-own-books-2017
June 29, 2017
–
Finished Reading
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Dustin
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Aug 31, 2016 07:04PM
I see that you're trudging along with this one. How's it treating you?
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Dustin wrote: "I see that you're trudging along with this one. How's it treating you?"I actually am enjoying it, though it will likely take all year to complete it. I've been reading too many very long books this year and this one seems to get short shrift since I gave up on reading it to a timetable. Pynchon really is amazing. At least this, at about 1080 pages, is shorter than The Cairo Trilogy which I just finished which came in at ca. 1300 pages!
Kudos to you, Sue! I have not gotten on very well with Pynchon. I've tried reading Gravity's Rainbow at least five times , never getting beyond 100 pages or so . Probably won't try this one but I enjoyed your review!
Angela M wrote: "Kudos to you, Sue! I have not gotten on very well with Pynchon. I've tried reading Gravity's Rainbow at least five times , never getting beyond 100 pages or so . Probably won't try this one but I e..."Thanks Angela. This took me much too long but last year was a very crazy year for me. If you were to try another one, I'd recommend Mason & Dixon though it does take a bit to get started. It's "only" 875 pages. :-)
Great review, Sue - I like how you highlighted its main themes of light, time and space, and identified the varied roles of its characters so well!
Thanks Jaline. This is such a massive book that I decided to organize it by what I found as the major themes and metaphors. Takes me back to my college days in a way only now I think I may understand the ideas a bit more. :-)
Sue wrote: "Thanks Jaline. This is such a massive book that I decided to organize it by what I found as the major themes and metaphors. Takes me back to my college days in a way only now I think I may understand the ideas a bit more. :-)"That's what I love about re-reading, too - just wish writers would take a bit of time off so we could do so a bit more. I loved all the notations you made along the way - what a journey! - and it is all beautifully diarized. :)
This is one of the things I love about GR, having my experience of the book all in one place. At times I will read an old review and everything is there; all the saved quotes, the discussion, everything so I can relive the whole thing.
Sue wrote: "This is one of the things I love about GR, having my experience of the book all in one place. At times I will read an old review and everything is there; all the saved quotes, the discussion, everything so I can relive the whole thing."It's funny you would say that! I have a huge spreadsheet on my home computer with my book lists (read, unread, and want to read but don't have yet) and tonight I was transferring over some books to my wishlist shelves here. I probably eliminated at least 2 dozen books from my spreadsheet this evening because I browsed reviews and read the synopsis and wondered, "what was I thinking?" :D
Sue wrote: "This is one of the things I love about GR, having my experience of the book all in one place. At times I will read an old review and everything is there; all the saved quotes, the discussion, every..."Same here!
Jaline wrote: "Sue wrote: "This is one of the things I love about GR, having my experience of the book all in one place. At times I will read an old review and everything is there; all the saved quotes, the discu..."Every once in a while I come across a book on my list that I no longer want to read and wipe it off. I know more about it than when I initially added it, possibly as long as 7 years ago, and I have many books I want to read much more.
Lisa wrote: "Sue wrote: "This is one of the things I love about GR, having my experience of the book all in one place. At times I will read an old review and everything is there; all the saved quotes, the discu..."And it's such a good feeling.
Sue wrote: "Every once in a while I come across a book on my list that I no longer want to read and wipe it off. I know more about it than when I initially added it, possibly as long as 7 years ago, and I have many books I want to read much more."I am definitely seeing that, too, Sue! Marketing catches all of us from time to time, which is why I'm so happy we are all here to keep each other from making Big Mistakes! :)
I'm impressed, Sue. Reading Pynchon is no small potatoes. Some people won't even hazard reading the guy (not that I'm speaking loudly or anything...).
Jaline, Definitely. Nice to have help in identifying good...and not so good...books.
:-) Ken I think part of the secret is being stubborn and having a high tolerance for non-traditional and sort of weird stuff. I do like the weird. But tolerating the "different" is essential with Pynchon from what I've read. You're traveling along in some relatively normal conveyance and then you may be in another version of the same world. As a reader, I may not have understood everything, but I was willing to go along, "suspend my disbelief" as we used to say in English classes.
A valuable skill, suspending disbelief, especially given political developments of late! If Pynchon gets a nod for that, a big nod his way!
Have to admit I'm having more difficulty with this in the real world, Ken. Pynchon does seem to tie his ideas into big and basic truths in the end, regarding the place of power and wealth in injuring average people or causing war, or controlling science (at least trying to),... Nothing changes is what I come away with. But in his books, good does triumph some of the time and evil suffers or is destroyed.
If only life as in books! Sadly, we are, as the Boston Globe recently stated, now living in a Shameless World.
Yes, the concept of shame seems gone from a very large portion of the world, sadly, along with conscience.
Sue wrote: "Yes, the concept of shame seems gone from a very large portion of the world, sadly, along with conscience."And, my biggest pet peeve: the disintegration of common sense.
Jaline wrote: "Sue wrote: "Yes, the concept of shame seems gone from a very large portion of the world, sadly, along with conscience."And, my biggest pet peeve: the disintegration of common sense."
Oh yes, definitely. Which leads to people suing everyone for everything. No sense of personal responsibility at all. If your coffee is hot don't drink it, don't try to drive with it in your hand and then sue the place you bought it when it spills in your lap.
Life is easy when everything is everyone else's fault. The World Turned Upside Down = adults who now behave like children who haven't learned yet.
Ken wrote: "Life is easy when everything is everyone else's fault. The World Turned Upside Down = adults who now behave like children who haven't learned yet."You nailed it, Ken!
Sue wrote: "Oh yes, definitely. Which leads to people suing everyone for everything. No sense of personal responsibility at all. If your coffee is hot don't drink it, don't try to drive with it in your hand and then sue the place you bought it when it spills in your lap."
I have heard about some of those ridiculous lawsuits and we laughed about it, but it is actually scary. It's not only lack of accountability and responsibility on the part of those foolish people - but where is the integrity of the lawyers? The judge? The arrogance of setting such precedence is appalling to think about.
Jaline wrote: "Ken wrote: "Life is easy when everything is everyone else's fault. The World Turned Upside Down = adults who now behave like children who haven't learned yet."You nailed it, Ken!
Sue wrote: "Oh..."
Ken wrote: "Life is easy when everything is everyone else's fault. The World Turned Upside Down = adults who now behave like children who haven't learned yet."
Jaline and Ken--everything is so beyond normal now. I just hope there is some way of returning to some semblance of it in the future. I don't have any ruby slippers to click together, though.
There's no place like the past, there's no place like the past...
A new mantra, Ken. I love it, though I know we are all supposed to always be looking to the future. At the moment, I'll take 3 years ago.
Wonderful. Thank you for the review.
You’re welcome, William. This was quite an amazing book.
Sue wrote: "You’re welcome, William. This was quite an amazing book."I can see that in your notes!
Great review Sue � the readers conundrum when explaining or reviewing TP is spot-on � despite not ‘understanding� much of the allusion-based text, it’s not often to the detriment of the enjoyment of the novel at all!
So true, BookWarren. If I were to consider it as a negative or”defeat� I think I would be denying myself the wonder of the experience. TP’s novels really are experiences aren’t they.
Just completed my third reading - gets better every time. Loved your review!
