The Thomas Pynchon Poll

this seems to presume he has published his last, or that nobody could possibly vote for anything new he publishes

Against The Day had the feel of a last masterpiece, to be fair. I might vote for it

I know it's the safe choice, but Gravity's Rainbow is the best book ever, so it has to be that one for me.

poor perverse POLL

m&d vs gr imo

GR always and forever

GR > ATD > M&D

but V., Crying of Lot 49, and Inherent Vice are the ones I've re-read most

been thinkin off and on of rereading ATD sometime

M&D for me, agree with Harold Bloom's assessment, this is the one that really moved me

of what ive finished - lot49>bleeding edge>vineland

have read parts of V & GR and ATD but p sure never completed any

I've only read four of these, and can remember next to nothing about V

comes down to gravity's rainbow vs against the day for me, though lot 49 is really a perfect little book - I don't know why I'm not that inclined to investigate his noirish ones, since I really dig the less panoptic single-protagonist approach in 49 (plus I love the film of inherent vice). I need to read mason & dixon but christ knows where I'll find the time

gravity's rainbow obv but i have a lot of love for Vineland

(and for everything through ATD tbh)

voted v cuz i loved it so much when i was young and i don't think it will pick up many votes. i think i'd have to go gr by a hair over m&d, still really need to read atd.

hard not to just pick gravity's rainbow, but throwing a vote at my sentimental favourite: m&d

Same here, think it might win bc of that

mason & dixon is so beautiful when read out loud

^^^

i must've done hundreds of pages aloud, alone in an apartment, on my single reading.

the only other book i've done that with on first go is moby-dick

Lot 49 one of the few books I remember having a really powerful emotional "can I handle reading this it's so intense" reaction to, so that one. Well, also because the only ones I've read are Lot 49 and V. and I really didn't like V. at all, had to force myself through. I've read the beginning of Mason and Dixon and it's clearly something I'd like but haven't made the time to commit.

I read 'em all in order.

V is great on its own and has some extraordinary vignettes but fades to merely good once he gets a handle on where he's going.

Lot 49 gets better and better every time you read it. Brevity will keep it from garnering votes, including mine, but it deserves real consideration.

gave up on my second run through it a few years ago for some reason. will need to revisit.
love the cover for the bantam paperback edition...

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1422/5128877033_6a32c0bcc7.jpg

M&D affects me most and aligns most closely with my interests so i will click the meaningless poll option for that probly

the only other book i've done that with on first go is moby-dick

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Sunday, December 13, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Moby-Dick twitter really is the best lit-twitter account - really looking forward to picking it up and savoring its language over xmas.

Mason & Dixon is his best, but Bleeding Edge and V are the only two I can't imagine anyone wanting to vote for.

man fuck yall v haters i love that v *makes v w/ fingers wags tongue between them*

V is incredible! I look forward to reading BE again but yeah, not his best

GR > CL49 > slow learner > against the day > inherent vice > vineland > bleeding edge. haven't gotten around yet to reading the other two

based on the ones i've read, i voted Vineland.

M&P has the best prose, COL49 best plot + paranoid-funny mystery, Inherent Vice a gauzier version of same. Never read GR.

I need to re-read 49, which I've owned for for 18 years and only read 1 1/2 times.

only ever read 49, Gravity's Rainbow, parts of V, and Vineland (and a story from Slow Learner). GR wins.

that's the copy of 49 that I have (shown above). i'm irrationally attached to the copies of these books I got first; I also have the paperback V and other editions look weird to me.

the book crying of lot 49

M&D>GR>VINE>LOT49>V.>ATD
Haven't read the others.

I've only read Slow Learner, Mason & Dixon, and Gravity's Rainbow. M&D's my favorite by far.

have not read vineland, against the day or bleeding edge

any of those essential?

i just voted for against the day here. depends on your tolerance for freewheeling esoteric psychedelia, or whether indeed you live for such a thing

AtD is essential as far as i'm concerned. i've been meaning to give it a reread too.

bleeding edge and inherent vice are the only non-essentials imo. vineland is tremendous.

Only read 49 and GR. 49 seemed like a pretty great, quick distillation of Pynchon. Need to reread. Things got foggy for me during the last act.

GR was monumental. One of those reading experiences I will never forget. One section I think about a lot (and should reread this week) is when Jessica and Roger (I think?) go to church during Christmas to watch a choir and it pulls away for this beautiful exploded montage of everyone and everything at that moment. Remember having to put the book down and take a walk after that.

I think there's a little bit too much material in Against The Day although there's a lot of incredible stuff in there as well. The idea of taking all these kids and basically throwing them out across the world to be propelled by huge historical forces grinding into gear works really well and adds a lot of emotional heft, but there are other times where you can see the levers moving too obviously. After a while I could almost feel myself groaning whenever another Western chapter began, and the section in the Balkans really dragged.

Having said that, I love the sections with the Chums of Chance, the mysterious ship, and a lot of the writing about light and science is wonderful. I can't imagine being into Pynchon and not finding a lot to enjoy in there.

GR > M&D >> CoL49 > BE > IV > AtD > Vi > V (=SL?)

Not much in the top 2, as per others in the thread. I like M&D more, but GR feels so huge and inescapable.

Tight in the middle too. Matt DC otm about AtD – those Western chapters felt thin and long, but there was spectacular stuff in there & I think I should reread it. Love the relaxed Pynchon of the last couple, very soft for them.

i like inherent vice slightly more than lot 49 and feel like i'm alone there

anyway: m&d

http://i.imgur.com/UleKV0p.jpg?1

I enjoyed Bleeding Edge as much as Vineland and think Inherent Vice is better than either of those

this thread is making me think I've under-rated M&D ... he does things in M&D he doesn't accomplish elsewhere

Been thinking about Bleeding Edge a lot the last day or two, thanks to this thread. Read it once for a review and never went back, as I found it really unsatisfying - the protagonist was the only character I bought, also maybe the weirdness of a Pynchon book set in a timeframe when I was sentient threw me off in some way. Left me cold and indifferent overall though there were strong moments.

Something I touched on in my initial review - and that I feel stronger about now than ever - is that this book was SUPPOSED to feel flat and unconvincing. That in the end BE is a book about 2001-2002 that's actually mirrored on how we (all of us) actually process information age overload circa 2010-?, i.e. we're easily distracted and nothing's quite real or has as much weight as it would/should if we weren't so easily distracted. Not to say that Pynchon always resolves his conspiracies cleanly but this one just kinda drifted out of the novel's focus, as though suddenly the novel was bored, had had enough, was onto something else, like the protagonist making up with her husband. The conspiracy was just something exciting that happened online, then something popped up on another tab, and the novel's attention was riveted to that.

i was going to put m&e at the top of my reading list based on the earlier posts, but raymond makes bleeding edge sound very compelling too (and it's lighter).

i clicked atd over gr and cl39 to make sure it got some votes and also because thinking about reading it transports me in a way that makes me want to be in the thick of it again...

i agree with matt's criticisms upthread, but feeling stuck in the middle is also part of its charm... i love opening it.

light and time and explosions will never not be interesting; the photography stuff in particular was magic to me. film is magical and it does actually change time.

and is there any other conceivable context to explore the theory of quaternions at length?

also the mayo factory is maybe the all-time pynchon set piece gag...

plechazunga ftw there i think, or maybe the cheese-rolling festival... we should poll this

oh come on is everyone being perverse gravity's rainbow is the clear choice seriously and if it somehow fails to win then this board is full of poxy fules.

and CoL49 is really not that good, all told.

bunch of people who've read Pynchon's books are being perverse by voting for the one they like the best

is everyone being perverse
it's the thomas pynchon poll

glad an expert came along to inform us why we're wrong

Happy to be of assistance.

49 is pretty good. he was perfecting the musical novel he'd go gangbusters with in GR. the paranoids are one of the great (and first or near to it?) fictional rock bands

i remember it as a lot of conceptual overreach, v. few just strikingly *good* passages, and very little in the way of characters i cared about. haven't read it again recently though, because I never had the urge. the entropy stuff sort of embarrassing in terms of not yet knowing how to integrate science cleanly, so very sterile, showoffy and just... off. The Courier's Tragedy is the only part i remember as especially striking in a sort of "oh, you can _do_ that?" sort of way.

GR on the other hand is so wonderful to just get lost in over and over again -- so many moments of humanity, so many well realized characters, such great slapstick, and really, just so much to say thematically.

M&D and ATD both have a lot to recommend them, but neither has the obsessiveness, the specificity, the whirlwind of activity at the verge of dissolution in the same sort of way. They both function as prequels in a way, tracing certain thematic strands but at earlier quieter moments, where more was latent and more was possible, or at least yet the inevitability of other ways wasn't so clearly inscribed.

And I agree on ATD being unbalanced as well, although I loved the western stuff just fine and thought the Traverse family was the real core of the novel -- the later europe stuff lost me as well but I think I could go back and tackle it differently (it just emerged so late in the novel i didn't know what to make of it). Chums of Chance felt a bit twee as a counterpoint to me, although not cloyingly so -- just that the novel didn't need them to work, and arguably if those sections were just pulled out into a separate book, both novels would read well enough as standalone works.

BE never grabbed me, but I thought IV was as good as any of his "little" books, and I'm not sure how I'd stack it up against Vineland -- which was the first I read and will always be a favorite for that reason alone, but is also hard for me to realistically assess for the same reason.

otoh one of the most memorable passages in all pynchon imho is M&D: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/234236-does-britannia-when-she-sleeps-dream-is-america-her-dream---

and another is ATD:

What Jesse had ended up writing was,
It means do what they tell you and take what they give you and don't go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down.
"That's what they call the 'topic sentence'?"
"That's the whole thing."
"Oh."

the bizarre love triangle out west in AtD is peak pynchon, hell peak american Lit

xp A+ would grade again

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

let's pretend one crying voter went for vineland and we only got square results

i have a hardback copy of vineland on the floor next to me, its been on the floor for over a year since i threw it at a moth which is now squished underneath it

vin elan (ex)dee

thomas pynchon books most/only tolerable read quickly now
there's probably a subreddit where people insufflate garbage off of silk road and read his thousand page novels in a single sitting
in lieu of that, quite enjoyed the first half hour of bleeding edge a year or so ago

good results, although surprised at the good showing of V and poor showing of ATD imho.

Btw did I mention that wonderful theory on Pynchon's "big" novels as themed around conic sections -- so clearly the case now that it was explained!

V -- a straight cut
Gravity's Rainbow -- Obv the parabola
M&D -- the elliptical orbit of the planets
ATD -- hyperbola

Yeah, I don't quite believe that. First of all, GR is not just a parabola, it's a rainbow: A parabola if looked at from one way, a circle when looked at from another. (this is the main point of my thesis, so I'm quite adamant on it). And V is not really a cut, it's a V. And I don't really get the two others. I think the three different parts of M&D are shaped like light: First a bunch of different rays, then collected into a single ray as through a lens (the quest in America) and then splitting up again as through a prism (the lack of knowledge of their later life). ATD I need to reread.

An incredible part of M&D is when he uses The Black Hole in Calcutta as a distortion of history, the way Black Holes distort light in relativity. There's so much about science and history in that book, and I love it. But GR is still a bit better :)

Frederik, "gravity's rainbow" = parabolic arc of a projectile

Yes, as I wrote, I wrote my masters thesis on that book, so I've heard that before, but I disagree. Remember: You shoot the projectile hard enough, and it goes into orbit. It becomes a circle. It's mentioned in the book several places. There's a place at the end of the book, where it's called the manicheism of the rocket kabala: Good rocket, bad rocket. Parabola, circle. Don't have my book with me, so can't quote it, but it's there.

Sorry, it's the other way around: Parabola is bad rocket, and circle is good rocket.

orbits aren't circles, in general, though

i think you're reading "themed around" too directly -- just that they each have a central motif that matches a shape that matches a conic section, not that this structures how they're actually constructed (where GR is arguably more a mandala as in the rocket mandala, and i'm open to your reading of M&D, but I also see it as "hung" on the recurrence of the transit of venus, and ATD arguably more optical in its structure, with the crystal splitting and all). but yes, you have V, which is literally the shape of a straight cut through a cone, a parabola central to GR, an elliptical orbit central to M&D, and hyperbolic doubling and refraction central to ATD -- certainly all have a lot more going on, but it seems an intentional "joke" or "gesture" at the least.

Well, sure, if we're just going with that these shapes appear in the books, we can say that. I remembered it as the books being build up as these shapes, which seems wrong. But Bleeding Edge is almost as long as V, and doesn't really have it. And a lot of these themes is in all the books, light for instance, as you say, play as big a role in ATD as in M&D.

definitely, the passages on light are among my fave parts of ATD

missed this poll, so a write-in for that

xp, yeah, i think the reading in the article pointing it out (by harris) is pretty tendentious in the specifics, but i still do like the overall observation.

man Bleeding Edge is a slog – a self-parody.

Inherent Vice too tbh

I liked IV!

i did too but it was p much Lot 49 (DJ Lebowski extended mix)

nah, he's become so much of a better writer since lot 49

AtD: currently my favourite, tho this always kinda just means the one i read most recently
M&D: i think his best and deepest -- i love that it's abt america just before the revolution (he must have just shouted w/glee when he discovered in pre-novel research that one of M&D stayed in the UK and one emigrated) (tracer tells me THE SOTWEED FACTOR is also abt america just before the revolution, so i guess i shd read that
VL: very fond of this, it's the one where he learnt to do affection between characters and i prefer him like that -- tho it leaves brock vond a weak reed (like he forgot how to do villains)
BE: getting a raw deal here -- his "novels of times as they are now" (this, VL and CoL49) are always full of alert observation, and i think there's tons here that's (a) accurate and (b) not in any other novels -- need to reread, maybe disenchantment will kick in (ie my allergy to cyberpunk -- as i was reading it i was thinking "i much prefer this to gibson")
IV: re the film (which i liked) even quite smart ppl seem to go with "who needs another big lebowski?" -- well i hate big lebowski, who needs even one, IV isn't a bit like it… book is lowish mainly bcz i'm a tiny bit allergic to marlowism
GR: putting it here looks challopsy -- and i think you can find me raving abt it on early ilx (s.clover will remember) -- but i honestly read this once too many times (8 or 9) and just have no will to, again; this surprised me too (it has great set-pieces of course)
CoL49: superb as a second novel by a young writer, several great set-pieces and startling ideas*, like VL and BE a "novel of times as they are now" (fun to read alongside didion) but his inexperience sentence-making shows now and then, several of the characters don't really work (for example the paranoids), and i always felt tripped up and let down by its brevity
V.: a handful of scenes i still remember from reading it first and only time c.1981, but i also have an allergy (much larger this time) to beatnikery and this i remember as rancid with it >:( never tried to reread it, i know i probably should
SL: bleh, there's really nothing much here (his intro essay is quite funny)

*the man's face on the stamp transfixed with fright and horror

^^^think i did a listing on another pynchon thread recently, i bet it's completely different -- if not it's only bcz i didn't reread one between then and now, my favourite always seems to be the one i'm reading unless it's the bottom three -- which has been hard on GR, as i just have no taste to reread ever again :(

Iirc, the main character from The Sotweed Factor has a cameo in M&D.

i've unpacked almost all my books - except for the box with my pynchon in it. my life feels incomplete.

Also, I've probably said this constantly, but building upon M&D taking place right before the American Revolution, to me it's remarkable how many of his novels take place right before a big historical event. Bleeding Edge before 9/11, Against the Day before WWI, and while Gravity's Rainbow is often called a novel about WWII, to me it's more accurate to say it takes place in the space between the end of the World War and the beginning of the Cold War. Iirc, there's a lovely passage in M&D about how time is like rays of light, and just as a telescope collect rays of light and turns them into a much clearer beam, so does certain events collect rays of time and turn them into a much bigger stream. Or something like that. And in a way, so much of Pynchons writing is about that, looking at all the little beams of time before they become big beams.

agree that Vineland is v endearing and also v sharp. probably in a similar spot on my list if i dared to make one, and in any case def underrated.

the big event in AtD is the TUNGUSKA EVENT!

i actually shouted out loud with happy excitement when i realised it was just round the corner, a chapter or so before it arrived, something like 'OH MY GOD OF COURSE"

AtD is kinda the one that goes straight into alternative history, so that makes sense...

I love the whole light/time thing in M&D, and one of the best parts is when the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' is described as a literal black hole, that distorts history the way black holes distorts light. Though of course, none of the astronomers in M&D has any idea what a black hole is.

oops i just realised i spoilered it for ppl who haven't read it, sorry abt that everyone who hasn't read it

>:-(

hmm what's the big event in Vineland?

Poppy Bush's vomiting on the Japanese prime minister.

:/

Vineland and Inherent Vice instead take place after an event, which would in world history terms just be called 68. That's kinda the central event in Pynchons ouvre, around which everything else circulates.

those two books in particular always somehow remind me of pere ubu's song "laughing":

My baby says: We can live in the empty spaces of this life
My baby says: Far away the stars are coming all undone
My baby says, my baby says: But that's far away, and we're young
My baby says: if the devil comes we'll shoot him with a gun
My baby says: We can live in the empty spaces of this life
My baby says: In the desert sands, our hearts are brighter than the sun
My baby says: When the devil comes we'll shoot him with a gun
My baby says, my baby says: And if he shows his face, we'll laugh

except pynchon's idea of an empty space is a teeming bustle of a space (and actually, given fred's idea of the importance of light and dark in some of the others, maybe more of the books now remind me of this song)

(mainly i just love this song, so probably everything reminds me of it)

The Argentinian revolutionary in Gravity's Rainbow has a really good discussion of empty space.

I want to stick up for BE but can't. Maybe someone who's more into it can post like one passage that ranks up with the best of 'em from any of the other novels, something to be a sort of guiding light for me to latch onto?

serious agree on IV the movie being nothing like BL

i probably would rank AtD top again, but I only ever read it cover to cover the once, and haven't been carving out enough time for pleasure reading to really dwell in it. the europe parts in the 2nd half fell apart for me on the first readthrough, with only the chums keeping me together. maybe second time round they'll click.

IV the movie isn't much like the book though (despite the fact that most of the dialogue is verbatim)

80 years old today.