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Delightful! I'd say this manicule is a proto-emoji of sorts.

> Thomas Pynchon parodies this punctuation mark in his novel Gravity's Rainbow by depicting a middle finger, rather than an index finger, pointing at a line of text.

Here is the section in Gravity's Rainbow which tells the tale of Byron the Lightbulb (the longest-burning lightbulb) and his troubles with the Phoebus Cartel:
https://www.tildedave.com/byron.html

In a book full of strange meandering asides, this was among the most memorable.

It sounds like you're asking for Gravity's Rainbow, which is the predecessor of both Neal Stephenson and the Illuminatus trilogy, and 10x more annoying to decode.

Haha, I tried reading Gravity's Rainbow this year and also abandoned it after about that many pages. I had no idea what was going on.

I'm a big fan of Mason & Dixon, which was the most difficult fun I've had reading a book in English. Gravity's Rainbow was also great fun. If you're a Buckaroo Banzai fan, and why wouldn't you be, you can thank Pynchon for the defense contractor Yoyodyne, which was appropriated from his novel V.

Gravity's Rainbow is not worth the slog, IMHO, unless you like beautiful plot constructions and vulgar wordplay. As a commentary on literature, as a novel, as a piece of writing, and most of all as a story, Mason & Dixon is (by far) Pynchon's greatest work.

The Crying of Lot 49 is the foil—short, with a meaningless story only good for the experience reading it.

Ulysses by James Joyce
Code Complete by Steve McConnell
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
Murphy by Samuel Beckett
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Pynchon is really worth the effort, V. and Gravity's Rainbow aren't that hard to read, I assume the hate is from people who haven't taken the time to read him. Not for the airplane.

What I would like to know is, how did Thomas Pynchon know about this when he wrote Gravity's Rainbow in the early 1970's? Research pre-internet.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/07/planned-obsole...

Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme - a collection of short stories

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - an encyclopedic novel, to say the least

It seems like after 100-200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow one of two things can happen:

1. The reader can't figure out what the hell is going on anymore or who anybody is. They give up and stop reading.

2. The reader can't figure out what the hell is going on anymore or who anybody is. They stop trying to make sense of the book and just read the words.

"Sure this guy has a toilet stuck to his foot now, and can prevent bombs from landing on him by magic or something. That's great, oh I think somewhere in that sentence it became 20 years earlier in a different part of town and there are two entirely different characters I don't know talking about something else. That's neat."

Hah, Gravity's Rainbow definitely belongs on that list.

I tried to read it. Really, really tried. For my head it's utterly unreadable. Had to give up after ~30 pages.

The writing flow and style of that book can be best described as "long-winded, over-extended, bloated and bloviating, rejected entry to Bulwer-Lytton contest".

I saw the movie. I had hoped it would be good, but I can't say that it was meaningful to me. The protagonist became a terrible shell of himself to have met his idol, and the idol himself was not a traditional hero, rather a matured one. I admit, I have yet to read Infinite Jest. I truly enjoyed Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, to whom David Foster Wallace was often compared, and I am glad you pointed out the author of TFA so I might read this present piece.

What an absolute shame. It's funny because I started reading Ulysses because it was available for a free e-reader iphone app. I had always been a bit wary of it (Pynchon drives me nuts and I often hear Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow mentioned together) but after reading a few chapters on the phone I picked up a copy and have been absolutely loving it.

Anyway, I realize that what was censored was a cartoon depicting the book . . . still, censoring something like Ulysses (of all things) is just short-sighted and ignorant.

There is a concordance for Gravity's Rainbow - which helps for non native readers.

That is assuming there is a corrected version the first printing I have confuses what a "redcap" is in the British military

No, the artist is supposed to experiment. Someone on the business side is supposed to rein it in when the experiment turns to rubbish. Sometimes this quashes something great, but mostly it ensures that artistic professionals can be supported by their own work.

But it is particularly unfortunate when such an experiment escapes into the wild, and a clique seizes upon it as a test for tribal identification.

It's okay to dislike "great literature" and enjoy "pablum for the lowest common denominator" or "escapism for immature minds". I don't really find a whole lot of value in critiquing other people's preferences. If you don't like a specific artwork, you should just keep sampling until you find something you do enjoy, no matter who else likes it. You're not going to make yourself happy by forcing yourself to like something just to fit in to a social group; you're far better off being honest with yourself. After all, you never really know if it's an Emperor's New Clothes situation until someone speaks up and says "I hated every word of this book, and I have no idea why anyone would think it's a masterpiece."

It may well be that will be followed up by "I only said I liked it so that you guys would think I was intelligent and cultured", "I read it in bed because it was such a reliable way to make me fall asleep", "I only read like a third of Gravity's Rainbow, and faked the rest of the way through for book club".

The footnote thing tripped me up. Some time after reading Infinite Jest (and Gravity's Rainbow) I decided to take a shot at writing a novel, and I splattered it with footnotes. It was great fun, but it quickly becomes an annoying habit, the kind you know you don't want to do that but you constantly find yourself doing that anyway. (So breaking the habit was exceedingly annoying.)

> it is sad that we don't seem to have authors who write fantastic prose anymore

To spin this around a little: we don't talk about authors in the past whose prose isn't worth going back to. Shakespeare had many contemporaries, but you might be hard pressed to name more than a couple.

Good prose can be challenging, and people don't want to be challenged all the time. I admire Pynchon's writing in Gravity's Rainbow - I don't want every book I read to be like that.

Or to put it another way: there are many novels from the 19th century that were massively popular at the time, but totally forgotten about now. They were novels that were pretty average in terms of prose, but had stories that were relevant to people at the time, and gripped them.

I doubt if in a hundred years people will still be reading the Da Vinci Code - but I can guarantee books like Infinite Jest, The Satanic Verses, Nights at the Circus, and the like will be attracting critical attention.

I'm not convinced you can compare Ulysses to Gravity Rainbow and Infinite Jest. Ulysses is not a postmodern book. Apart from their length, there are few things bringing these books together.

Gravity Rainbow has Pynchon's inimitable prose, constant segue between language register and mingling between the trivial and the profound. Infinite Jest is rambling and convoluted but it is extremely funny from the get go. Both can be a joy to read even if you don't finish them.

Ulysses on the other hand asks more from its readers. You can pretty much ignore the references in Gravity's Rainbow and still get (or not get) the point. Meanwhile, Ulysses is full of oblique metaphors and layered references which make it impossible to understand without knowledge of the referenced material.

Obviously with any list there's going to be quite a lot of nits to pick... At any rate, here are mine.

Sad to see Stanislaw Lem completely left out in favor of some obviously inferior books (Anathem!?). Also a curious choice for the obligatory Atwood novel. Surprised that Gravity's Rainbow was not on there- I'd put it near the top (maybe it wasn't "Sci-Fi" enough?)

Good to see Canticle for Leibowitz as well as a fair amount of Asimov and Dick.

Melville was already an established author after Typee and Omoo - Moby Dick was sort of like a Sgt Pepper situation. People expected a sea story and they got something quite a bit different. Or imagine if Tom Clancy wrote ten Jack Ryan books and then Gravity's Rainbow or something.

Sadly many authors don't get the recognition they deserve for generations afterwards... but the important thing is they didn't let that possibility dissuade them from writing!

Gravity's Rainbow - took 4 months out of my year, but and it's still mostly a whoosh, but every time I started reading another book after that, it was just amazing how much better Pyncheon writes. Will revisit it for sure, though not very soon.

Anna Karenina - just a whole different level, Tolstoy's writing in a way I don't feel many contemporary writes could. Feels creepy how similar the people's lives in the 19th Century was to ours. Creepy but fun too.

If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino will just punch you in the face, this is a book for people who love reading books.

The Magicians - adult magic fiction, and somehow it feels that if magic was indeed real, it would be like it is depicted here, not like anything in Harry Potter's (no matter how much I loved the storytelling, the magic theory was just so full of plotholes).

The Casual Vacancy - JKRowling's not-Harry-Potter-book. It's very gritty, and feels very real. Still having my cold shivers thinking of small-town living after this.

(Except for the last one the others are older releases, don't usually jump into the newest ones, I just take it casual)

It depends heavily on the genre, at least for me. So-called genre fiction--mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, that sort of thing--really doesn't hold up to rereading, since the whole draw is, by and large, the setting and the plot. I still remember the solution at the end of Murder on the Orient Express, and I still know how Liu Cixin's theory of galactic civilizations is going to play out in the Three Body Problem, so there's not really a draw to reread those books: the language is serviceable but not exciting (at least in the translated TBP), there's no real symbolism/inter-textuality to dig into on further readings, &c. However, I still find myself rereading favorites like Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick every few years: the jokes are still funny, the language is still beautiful, and it's still enjoyable to ponder the references and metaphors the authors are (possibly) building.

Your comparison to television is a pretty good one, honestly. I've never really rewatched an episode of a serial television series (other than trying to refresh my memory when picking up a new season), since there usually isn't any substance there beyond the plot and characters, but I'll happily rewatch movies if the directing, cinematography, and/or acting are compelling enough.

Sure, if it's not a huge digression. Gravity's Rainbow and In Remembrance Of Things Past, which I haven't read yet and are long enough to justify print reading. House of Leaves, a favorite book of mind which has a very unusual typographic layout. A Best of The Onion encyclopedia, for reading when I have to kill a little time. The last book is called Syrup, by Maxx Barry, and is maybe the best light reading I've ever come across. It's not at all deep, but it's three hundred fast-paced pages and I've read it more than anything else I can think of, because I've never been in a mood where I've picked up the book and it hasn't been appealing.

Then on the Kindle I have all the Asimov, medium-length novels, nonfiction, kid's books, essays, etc. It's a dream set-up and it all fits in a backpack.

cf. Byron the Bulb in Thomas Pynchon's book Gravity's Rainbow http://lukedanger.blogspot.com/2009/02/story-of-byron-bulb.h...

This is a fascinating piece - especially concerning Pynchon's coverage of the class warfare aspect to machinery-as-capital.

My favorite parts:

- His treatment of Luddism as class warfare; a recognition that the access to the means of production by the machines paired with their replacement and downward pressure on individual wages concentrates power. We have (had?) a myth that the internet would be 'democratizing' in its power, but it's gone much the same way toward concentration.

- Pynchon eerily predicts biological sciences, AI and robotics starting to converge and how it will catch us flat footed - and already we are seeing the emergence of extremely rough AIs contain people in information bubbles.

- Pynchon spells the paradox of deluge of information available to us so very well; while we might think that anyone can become an expert in anything the opportunity cost and the amount of information immediately relevant to our fields isolates us from being broad renaissance men.

Gravity's Rainbow was more than a pleasure. I wish Pynchon had written more of these short critical lens essays.

There are some novels (Gravity's Rainbow comes to mind) where I frequently had to look up various events and people that were mentioned in the text. I can see this being helpful, but I'd probably prefer an "annotated edition" where you could view notes written specifically for the book you were reading instead of generic Wikipedia links.

Unfortunately I haven't encountered any ebooks that handle annotations in a pleasant way that takes advantage of the technology. The few I've seen that had annotations just had hyperlinks to a different page in the ebook, which makes you lose the context. With ebooks, endnotes like these seem absurd to me; the annotation should be viewable inline on the original page.

I tried 3 times to read Gravity's Rainbow in proper order, but couldn't get engaged. Finally, I just started skipping forward reading portions of pages until I found something I found interesting. Eventually made it to the end, skipping occasionally when it threatened to become a slog. I knew I'd come back for the full experience once I understood the terrain better. And so I did.

Gravity's Rainbow is a cool book, but it's actually about the V2 rockets (roughly 1,300 of which hit London), that started being used in 1944.

Meanwhile the "blitz" and The Battle of Britain were an entirely different part of the war, taking place about four years earlier, and this map seems to cover that period of time, from late 1940 to mid-1941.

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. This book is wonderfully calming, don't worry about what it means, just soak in it.

I'll also add another vote for The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

On a darker note, if you had any illusions left, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke)

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Hobsbawm)

Bhagavad Gita

Upanishads

Crimes Against Logic: Exposing the Bogus Arguments of Politicians, Priests, Journalists, and Other Serial Offenders (Whyte)

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)

edit: added 2 more & author names

After reading a string of books that basically did nothing for me, and then reading a book that completely enveloped me and messed with my head (House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski), I've made a a point of giving books about 50-100 pages to grab my attention, and then moving on if I'm not interested.

I do seek out books from lists like "100 greatest books of the 20th century" and similar, but it doesn't bother me in the slightest to say that War and Peace was dry, repetitive, and completely uninteresting, or that Ulysees' and Gravity's Rainbow's prose were so incoherent, I couldn't make it even 50 pages in either book. On the other hand, The Brothers Karamozov is easily one of the top three books I've ever read, so I don't think its an aversion to classic literature in general.

I think using other people's opinions of books is a good starting point for finding books to read. But I derive no enjoyment whatsoever from knowing that someone else likes the music, or books, or movies that I like, so why should I feel guilty or question my tastes when I disagree with even the most highly regarded opinions?

Two come to mind for me.

The first is Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. This was the first political book I had ever read and it completely rocked my world. I knew the US was involved in some nefarious stuff, but never to that extent. Completely changed the way I read news / history & how I react to current events.

The other book is Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

I for one would have loved to have had the author as my AP teacher. Senior year was when I discovered (in the Columbian sense) David Foster Wallace, who would not exist as such without Pynchon. It would be a couple of years and attempts before I could get into Pynchon, but when I got to it, Gravity's Rainbow was an ecstatic experience.

David Foster Wallace writes (in an essay collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) about the connection for him between higher math and logic and writing fiction. About the "click" that happens when things fall into place. For several years, I chased exactly that in fiction, before returning to my teenage passion for programming. I was immensely pleased to find the same "click" in software. The same challenges of world creation, of collecting, balancing and combining incongruent, contradictory and abstract thoughts in my head before committing them to screen.

What I'm suggesting is Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, let's add, William Gass, are programmers' writers.

I'm on a David Foster Wallace kick right now: Working through The Pale King, his collected essays and his short stories. Already read Infinite Jest. It's hard to say what qualifies as "essential reading" when it's impossible for a human being to read even one tenth of the great, all-time classic books. There just isn't enough time. My advice would be to read at least a few books that have reputations for being difficult. War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, etc. (The reason I'm only listing near-undisputed classics here is because these books are difficult, and in some cases very, very long [looking at you, Proust], and the assurance that it is all worth it helps you keep going when your brain hurts.) These books survived despite their difficulty because reading them is a mind-expanding, sometimes life-changing experience. Reading shouldn't be essentially passive.