V. discussion

this took me YEARS to finish.

I don't expect to finish it in this lifetime. Probably I'll go into a coma when I'm done with Against the Day, and all I'll be able to read for a while is Hardy Boys. Which ain't that bad.

Thank you for validating my thoughts on this book. It's tortuous and I never did finish it.

I finished it in a couple months. It definitely took some time. But I loved it. I still think about it a lot and I might have to re-read it soon. I think I'd understand it better the second time. I hadn't read Pynchon before I read this. Now I'm up through Vineland.

I finished this in about a month. I'll admit, some parts dragged, and I definitely had to go back and re-read parts to get the characters straight. I enjoyed it for sure.

Either this is a thrilling adventure novel compared to Gravity's Rainbow (which was great, but more of a slog in places), or my reading habits have changed considerably in the past year, because I'm enjoying this so much. I wasn't so sure for the first 50 pages, I admit, but then: the Rhinoplasty scene was excruciatingly detailed, but still humane and funny, the gator-hunt through Faring's Parish bizarre but gripping, and this many-hued hidden city of the north that just came up terribly intriguing.

It's funny to read the first post, because it took me years to finish it, too. I kept going to it, leaving it, returning weeks or months later. It was a chore, but there was something about the book I knew I loved, even if i didn't LIKE it very much.

I finished it, and said, "The worst book I've ever read!" Later that day, I picked it up and started reading it again (true story) and finished it in a few days.

I've read it several times over the years, and it's still my favorite Pynchon book.

I finished it in a week.
My favorite Pynchon so far.

I don't remember how long it took me to read, but I know it wasn't nearly as long as Gravity's Rainbow. I think many of his books require time to digest, even if that time is years.

Atreides wrote: "I finished it in a week.
My favorite Pynchon so far."

I second that. It took me about 8-9 days to read this one, and it was the first Pynchon I read. I read Crying of Lot 49 maybe a year or two after I read this one, and I enjoyed that one, too, but V. is better. I like his style, and I'm looking forward to reading Gravity's Rainbow.

Pam wrote: "Atreides wrote: "I finished it in a week.
My favorite Pynchon so far."

I second that. It took me about 8-9 days to read this one, and it was the first Pynchon I read. I read Crying of Lot 49 may..."

So far I read V, Lot 49, Against the day and started Mason and Dixon.
But somehow I couldnt finished M and D and had to bring it back to the library.
I am looking foreward to try it again but I felt it is not his greatest novel, but V was a pageturner.

Also my favourite Pynchon, but I have yet to finish Mason and Dixon or Gravity's Rainbow. V. has everything a reader could want: it's funny, it's complicated, it has automatons, anachronistic cyborgs, crazy dentists, conspiracies and absolutely stellar prose. Nobody writes like Pynchon. Although I understand readers' frustrations with him as his narratives tend to obfuscate meaning and plot for what appears to be chaos (when in fact, there is a cold scientific mind operating behind the scenes).

Failed to finish this and Vineland. I keep trying Pynchon as he is lauded so often but my eyes just slip off the page as soon as i start reading him. I'll try V again in a year or so, last time I managed 100 pages or so before chucking it.

Really? I found V. a fairly quick and thoroughly enjoyable read up until the final chapter where he just goes OFF. Now that was a doozy of a finale. A case where an author departs into such a bizarre episode it almost winds up ruining the rest of the book. I mean, its practically opaque. The Stanley Kubrick 2001 of book endings; one of the few books I've ever encountered where I can not (with certainty) say for sure exactly how it ended.

If you think that final chapter was opaque...wait til you get a load of the final 1/4 of GRAVITYS RAINBOW.

I like how this conversation stretches out over half a decade, the same way some people read Pynchon. Now if someone will introduce a digression for a couple of years, we can then try to remember what our initial quest was before making some Three Stooges jokes.