Why is it worth reading?

>>9129838
it's not it's a fucking meme you retard. it's okay. but will confuse plebs. so you tell people it's good to trick them into reading it and wasting their time.

>>9129873
/lit/ makes me want to shoot myself sometimes.

>>9129873
>>9129949
The one thing I can't stand about most boards on 4chan is that everyone seems to think that we somehow shape culture. Pynchon was critically acclaimed before most people here were even born, to try and say that he's some inside joke that we came up with is ridiculous.

>>9129838
because its non-fiction and touches upon rare worldly actions, for literature, in rare ways

>>9129838
Nothing and everything is worth reading.

>>9129838
From my layman's perspective Pynchon travels throughout the entirety of human conscious/subconscious in this book and I could tell he was really fucked up when writing this. Also, it has so much fun with language that it's endearing.

>>9129838
it's worth reading for the part about "Super animals in my crack".

>>9129963

As much as many other authors, anon. The way internet shapes culture is not by making acclaimed authors acclaimed, but by spreading them. How many people do you think would have read pynchon outside college students? It's not like you find his complete bibliography in small town bookshops.

>>9130123
You mean fucked up like on drugs or like depressed?

>>9131187
you could easily make arguments for both.

>>9130776

I've seen him at airport bookshops before desu.

>>9131187
Pynchon said he was high while writing segments of it and it shows.

OP, it's a great book, imo. It's a joy to read, even if it is difficult to comprehend. Take it slowly, don't rush your time with it and if you can't follow / understand passages of it, that's fine and understandable. I ended up discussing passages I couldn't click with with people on /lit/ and had some enjoyable conversations. I also found it to be a pleasure to re-read paragraphs of the book until I came to with an interpretation that made sense to me.

It's a wonderful book imo, although it isn't for everyone and you'll know if it's not for you if after 30 pages you feel exhausted or frustrated by it.

The fact that you need someone to tell you this tells me that you are a simpleton and won't understand it

its good. not that hard either, although the 150 pages are just fucking bizarre, but by that point you will be invested enough to carry on.

>>9132663
Is that when Slothrop flushes himself in the toilet?

>>9129838

>beautiful and very unconventional prose
>exciting stories
>is very dark and at times disturbing but has a consistent sense of humor/charm so it's not just "lolsoedgy"
>has overarching themes but doesn't follow a generic good vs. evil narrative like most war stories

>>9133091
this.
It's a legitimately great book, probably the best that postmodernism can get. And it's not all just "lolsowacky" entertainment, either. I'd say it's one of the greatest reflections on literary interpretation and the sort of lack of interpretive center, or attempt to find a center within modern literature. Reminder that the only meme that is bad is Infinite Jest.

>>9132730
oh sorry I meant the last 150 pages, although that toilet scene was weird as well

>>9133091
>>9133123

Don't forget that Tommy P can put love across in such a strange way.

I'm so sorry, Roger...

>>9133091
How can I tell good prose from bad prose if english isn't my first language?

>>9130776
this. not an american, and if I didn't start browsing 4chan years ago, to this day, I would not know who pynchon, joyce, dfw, nabokov are

>>9133690
If you like it, its good, if you don't its bad

If 99% of people disagree with you, you may or may not be wrong and dumb/strange

>>9133820
did you read any of them since? Are you glad you know of them?

>>9133091
>war stories are about good or evil

This is how I know you don't read war stories.

>>9133869

I was talking in a general sense, not just books, but like every movie I've watched or video game I've played about WW2 or any war really is "this country is the good one, we have to kill the leader of the country that is the bad one. ex: Hitler."

>>9133848
yes, yes, very much.

first /lit/ book I read was the divine comedy. had start browsing /lit/ for a while before reading it and loved it. currently on my first pynchon, V., have also read dubliners, portrait and ulysses, lolita and few dfw essays.
loved joyce, was delighted by nabokov and uncertain about pinecone

>>9133968
complementing: since I have started browsing /lit/, those are not all the books I have read, they are all the books I have read from the examples I gave

>>9129838
>In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling, and outside the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls. Roger has taken Jessica’s cold hands in to warm against his breast, feeling them, icy, through his sweater and shirt, folded in against him. Yet she stands
apart, trembling. He wants to warm all of her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope. His heart shakes like the boiling kettle.

>It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing really holds her but his skinny, 20-pushup arms. . . . If she leaves, then it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps, girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be with her more . . . if it happened when they were together— in another time that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, certain situations are just more hep to the jive than others—but they’re apart so much. . . .

>If the rockets don’t get her there’s still her lieutenant. Damned Beaver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever made—that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane. Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace. She will take her husband’s orders, she will become a domestic bureaucrat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank God she didn’t make. . . . Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on—how the bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.

I thought it was a fun read, also the book has some really great prose.

>>9134255
>fun read!!
>great prose!!!
Yeah, you didn't understand it

>>9134265
I don't care if I "understood it", I still had a good time reading it. Isn't that what literature is all about? The fun times that you had in the end?

>>9134255
>Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate slides and falls.
When anyone on /lit/ shits on this book or doesn't get it or makes a thread yada yada; this sentence right here is worth reading the book for. That sentence is better than many novels.