|
2002-04-23 I keep trying. Six months after I put it down, I picked up Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow again. And then I put it down again cause it's so heavy. Hahahaha. Oh book jokes are the best, right? I know, you are saying, Andrew you fool, nobody actually reads that book, you use it as a weight to press the water out of tofu slices before you fry them (my mom's cooking tip). When I bought this book the clerk behind the counter shook her head while laughing and said, �Yeah, I tried that once.� But I think I've cracked it cause it's getting interesting. I�ve passed that little mark where something clicks in my head and I want to go on reading. His Mason and Dixon was hard going at first also but once you got use to the style it was easy and worth the effort. And now I�m into this one. Will I finish it? It�s so long I don�t know. I have the Penguin edition paperback and it still weighs a ton. Wait, I�ll go put it on my bathroom scale right now. Almost two pounds. And 756 pages. Actually I don�t think it�s the length that�s makes it such a notoriously hard read, but the fact that so many characters are introduced early on and that you don�t really know what�s going on at first. That�s what�s so comfortable about genre books, you know what to expect. In most fun �beach books� you know the hero is trying to stop evil Nazi�s from recovering the severed, frozen head of Adolph Hitler so they can bring him back to life. Well, in most of MY favorite beach books anyway. Can you read just a part of a novel and not feel like it was a waste of time? Is that ever acceptable? Like just eating three quarters of an apple and throwing out the rest? I�m going to be pissed if I finish this and it was all about Hitler�s severed, frozen head. Actually that would be the best. previous next |