Completists' Club discussion

I think it's a reasonably well-founded assumption that there are at least a few Pynchon completists on this site. As far as I know, our humble group creator is not and will never be one of them. Having recently dived into my last Pynchon tome however (still have V, Vineland and Inherent Vice to go), I've realised that I may be an unwitting completist of his works. Anybody out there who has finished his - sorry - oeuvre? If so, which were your favourites?

Am I missing something? How not? But I believe I lack only the final third of GR. But I'm only counting "have passed eyeballs over every word." I owe V, GR, and M&D all an intelligent, literate rereading. I think there are some linear notes Pynchy's written that I've not read.

Have you both read Slow Learner, then? I think I'm down to just that and Vineland, but then, Pynchon makes things a little easier by taking eons to produce new material.

Pynchon is too easy! when it comes to being a Pynchon completist at least... I've read all the novels and the story collection and some of his liner notes and articles. There's really not all that much. You might have to include the Wanda Tinasky letters too, though I'm not sure if the Pynchon freaks know if he wrote them or not.

Nate wrote: "Have you both read Slow Learner, then? I think I'm down to just that and Vineland, but then, Pynchon makes things a little easier by taking eons to produce new material."

Yep. Slow Learner check. It is clearly to be left for the end of Pynchonianism. Perhaps most useful from it is Tom's intro; a rare occasion of self-criticism. I wasn't so disappointed in Vineland as the hardcore were, but then I also didn't wait 18(?) years for its appearance.

Eddie wrote: "Pynchon is too easy!"

Quantity-wise, yes. Quality-wise he's a bit bigger feather-in-the-cap. Which is why I've a hard time crediting myself when I was thoroughly licked by three of his novels.

Aspiring Pynchon completist here. I just added all his books to my "to-read" shelf. I'm getting through GR right now but I'm working through chronologically.

I have a copy of Slow Learner and have read the introduction but haven't even glanced at its actual content. I sort of wish I hadn't left Vineland and Inherent Vice till last but, y'know. Maybe I'll read IV shortly before PT Anderson's adaptation is released.

I'm trying to keep it perfectly chronological according to publication date (strange and OCD, I know). But does Slow Learner come after Gravity's Rainbow, so before Vineland? I saw two different publication dates on it.

I'm enjoying Gravity's Rainbow but stopped halfway because a Dhalgren reading was started this month, and the Gravity's Rainbow group looks like it's past life since I came to it late. I'm a groupee.

I've read Lot 49, V, Gravity's Rainbow, and Vineland this year. Have Mason & Dixon, Inherent Vice, Against the Day, and Slow Learner waiting to be read.

All i want to say to you people in here, is: "Let me out of here, you bunch of freaky masochists!! Help! lemmeout! "

I would say "easy" is an unfair statement! Anyway, I'm in on this, as well. Slow like snail.

M&D is probably my favorite, and the one I most look forward to rereading. In part I'm attracted to it because it features Philadelphia prominently (where I now live), and as I grew up in Delaware, bounded on two sides by the Mason Dixon line, that part has a personal appeal as well; but I also like how he infused it with an emotional maturity without sacrificing his silliness.

I certainly didn't mean he was "easy" at the reading level! GR is one of the harder books to comprehend! I just meant easy at the completist level, since he has relatively few books.

It's finally happened. I've morphed all the postmodernist novels. I've read half of GR, breaking with Dhalgren, and will resume with the last half of GR. Basically, I'm reading Gravity's Dhalgren Rainbow.

Stephen M wrote: "Aspiring Pynchon completist here. I just added all his books to my "to-read" shelf. I'm getting through GR right now but I'm working through chronologically."

Chronological? I'm not worthy to be posting after you.

That's epic dude. I'm not expecting to finish my project for a long time ha.

But is it not, to quote Nathan who quoted Aristotle, the type of pleasure which outstrips all others?

Obscure pomo tomes: still not better than sex.

Is the amount of porno pomo you read inverse proportional to the amount of sex you get?

The only Pynchon I've managed to get through is The Crying of Lot 49 and it might just be on my top 10 list of favorite novels.

Fear not for I Con McVeety that's right from ATD have read all of Thomas Pynchon's novels. Now here is a sample from "Against The Day" page 586

Tancredi laughed grimly."You're American, you think you have to know everything. Others would perfer not to know. Some define Hell as the absence of God, and that is the least we may expect of the infernal machine-that the bourgeoisie be deprived of what most sustians them, thier personal problem-slover sitting at his celestial bureau, correcting defects in the every-day world below....But the finite space would rapidly expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around the intertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation. So this is not so much as a painting as a dialectial argumnet."

Anyone read or have heard of Thomas Pynchon's "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" if not here's a link

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncolle...

Con McVeety wrote: "Anyone read or have heard of Thomas Pynchon's "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" if not here's a link

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncolle..."

Nick wrote: "I only have Vineland left to read in order to become a Pynchon completist, and as it is sitting on my shelf waiting to be read, I could accomplish completion this year. But I'll be setting out upon..."

I have V, Vineland and 1/2 of Slow Learner, and Wanda Tinasky letters (insurance against the chance that he wrote them).

I've noticed with DFW and Pynchon, I've a tendency to read them in reverse chronological order (almost).

Con McVeety wrote: "Con McVeety wrote: "Anyone read or have heard of Thomas Pynchon's "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" if not here's a link

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncolle...""

Yeah, I once took several of his assorted essays, etc., and bound them in college (at the same time I bound J.D. Salinger's Hapworth 16, 1924 from the New Yorker).

I've got it somewhere in a box. We might need to include Pynchon's linear notes... but ‘Yowzah!’ that is like chasing a jazzy harmonica down a toilet hole for sure.

I've come to realize that resisting the completion of this author is futile. Here's to the (long term) full body submersion.

Also, bibliography (all credit goes to Wiki):

Novels and novellas

(1963) V.
(1966) The Crying of Lot 49
(1973) Gravity's Rainbow
(1990) Vineland
(1997) Mason & Dixon
(2006) Against the Day
(2009) Inherent Vice
(2013) Bleeding Edge

Juvenilia

(1952-53) "Voice of the Hamster" Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold 13 Nov, 18 Dec, 22 Jan, 19 Feb
(1953) "Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight" Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold 19 March 1953
(1953) "The Boys" Oyster Bay High School Purple and Gold 19 March 1953
(1958) "Minstrel Island" Outline and draft of unpublished musical written with John Kilpatrick Sale, held at University of Texas Harry Ransom Center

Short stories

(1959) "The Small Rain" Cornell Writer 6, March 1959
(1959) "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" Epoch 9, Spring 1959
(1960) "Low-lands" New World Writing 16
(1960) "Entropy" Kenyon Review 2 Spring 1960
(1961) "Under the Rose" Noble Savage 3
(1964) "The Secret Integration" Saturday Evening Post 19-26 December 1964
(1965) "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity" Esquire 64 December 1965)
(1966) "The Shrink Flips" Cavalier 16 March 1966

Short story collections

(1984) Slow Learner

Nonfiction

Technical Publications

(1960) "Togetherness" Aerospace Safety 16, no. 12 December 1960
(1960-62) Articles in various issues of Boeing's Bomarc Service News

Essays

(1966) "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" New York Times Magazine 12 June 1966
(1984) "Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?" New York Times Book Review 28 October 1984
(1993) "Nearer My Couch To Thee" New York Times Book Review 6 June 1993
(1996) "Lunch with Lotion" Esquire Vol. 125, No. 6 June 1996
(1999) "Hallowe'en Over Already?" Cathedral School Newsletter (New York) January 1999
(2006) "The Evolution of the Daily Show" The Daily Show: Ten Fu@#ing Years (The Concert) 16 November 2006

Letters

(1965) Letter cited in Jules Siegel's "The Dark Triumvirate," Cavalier 15 August 1965
(1966) "Pros and Cohns" New York Times Book Review 17 July 1966
(1976) Letter to Richard Wilbur, printed in William Styron's "Presentation to Thomas Pynchon of the Howells Medal for Fiction of the Academy," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters 26
(1977) Letter to the Editor, quoted by John Calvin Batchelor, "The Ghost of Richard Fariña." Soho Weekly News 4 28 April - 4 May 1977
(1988) Letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, quoted by David Seed, "The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon"
(1989) "Words for Salman Rushdie" New York Times Book Review 12 March 1989.
(1990) "Of a Fond Ghoul" selected letters from the files of Corlies Smith
(2006) Letter included in Nigel Reynold's "The borrower: 'why McEwan is no plagiarist'" Daily Telegraph 6 December 2006

Reviews

(1965) "A Gift of Books." Holiday 38:6 December 1965, review of the novel "Warlock" by Oakley Hall.
(1988) "The Heart's Eternal Vow" New York Time Book Review 10 April 1988, Review of Gabriel García Márquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera"

Introductions and Liner Notes

(1983) "Introduction" in Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me 3rd Edition
(1990) "Liner Notes" in Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich and Thurston Moore's LP Barefoot in the Head
(1991) "Introduction" in Donald Barthelme's The Teachings of Don B.
(1994) "Liner Notes" in Spike Jones' CD Spiked, The Music of Spike Jones
(1995) "Liner Notes" in Lotion's CD Nobody's Cool
(1998) "Introduction" to paperback edition of Jim Dodge's Stone Junction
(2003) "Introduction" in the Centennial Edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

I have read:

The Crying of Lot 49
Vineland
Mason & Dixon
and am on page 640 of Against the Day (I plan on finishing it by year's end. I can pick up and put down Pynchon at will, apparently. I did the same with Mason & Dixon: started it early January and finished it on Christams Eve. Nic way to bring in the holdiay season.)

Anthony wrote: "I have read:

The Crying of Lot 49
Vineland
Mason & Dixon
and am on page 640 of Against the Day (I plan on finishing it by year's end. I can pick up and put down Pynchon at will, apparently. I did ..."

it takes me half a year to read Pynchon's 700 plus page books, I like taking it in slow, it's more lasting that way

I will likely complete Bleeding Edge next week and will be a completist. That distinction also demands an urgent rereading: funny how that transpires.

I'm broke and can't buy it till payday,a week form today.

Hi everyone! Hi. I'm closing in on finishing my first Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, and golly gee willickers it sure is great! It's the bee's knees! So's I'm gonna read next I think Against The Day, because what a great title huh? And also I have it. Anyway, I'm pretty late to the game on this Pynchon fella but he won me over indeed, and I'll be intending to visit most of his work I think, as long as ATD doesn't prove to be a shitshow. That's all! Have a lovely day.

We appear to have psychically linked - I ordered ATD a few days ago as it it my last Pynchon, and plan to read it when it arrives!

Jonathan wrote: "We appear to have psychically linked - I ordered ATD a few days ago as it it my last Pynchon, and plan to read it when it arrives!"

Sweet! I got mine, hardcover 1st in fantastic shape, at a yard sale for one American dollar! A lucky find...

I finished Gravity's Rainbow the other day. What an experience that was!

I did get about 300 pages in to Against the Day and I thought it was pretty interesting. I really liked the Chums of Chance. But, as so often happens with me, some other book distracted me and I set Against the Day aside and just never got back to it.

Finished Mason & Dixon this month. I'll read Slow Learner eventually but I've read his complete set of novels. I'll also have to reread V, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day in the future.