Gravity's Rainbow

Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle and Gravity’s Rainbow

Paradise Lost, Gravity's Rainbow, Middlemarch, and 2666. edit: The short stories which have stuck with me the most over the years are probably Joyce's "The Dead," O'Connor's "Good Country People," and a solid half of Borges's "Ficciones."

Gravity's Rainbow

Foreign: * Life: a users manual by George s Perec. * Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal * Auto-da-fe by Elias Canetti Domestic: These are harder because I feel like they’re all pretty well known, but maybe they’re not actually read. Like, known bc people have heard the name, but are not read as much anymore. * Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson * Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon * Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy Actually unknown (but super good) domestic: * Stuff by Larry McMurtry (only famous for lonesome dove)

Getting More - Stuart Diamond. I still think this is the best book on the art of negotiation. Getting Things Done - David Allen. If you have adult ADHD like me, and you haven't read this, it's the first system that's really worked for productivity for me. Man's Search for Meaning - Victor Frankl. Living Buddha, Living Christ - Thich Nhat Hanh. Cosmos - Carl Sagan. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin. The One who Walks Away from Omelas - U.K. LeGuin. Wild Seed - Octavia Butler. The Heike Monogatari - (tr. Helen Craig McCullough) “The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind.” If you need a comparison. this is the Japanese historical equivalent of Game of Thrones combined with a bit of MacBeth. The rise and fall of two shogunate families, and an analysis of the tragic flaws of character that brought their fall about. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo. Small Gods - Terry Pratchett. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad.…

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (1973). The Platonic ideal of the Postmodern novel that combines a deep understanding of modernity with deep understanding and pessimistic view of technology. Purgatory, Dante (1320). No other work so elegantly grasps Christian Sanctification and it's true difficulties. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstin (1953). Like Pynchon, Wittgenstein understood quite well the exhausting pedantic nature of modern life. A book that can stand on it's own without having read much philosophy, this work attacks the foundations of most of "Modern" (I would label this as post Medieval philosophy ). Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Abelsson, Sussman, Sussman (1985). For me, the definitive "Programming is what exactly?" book. Computer Systems, a Programmer's Perspective, Bryant & O'Hallaron (2012). The Concrete Systems yin to SICP's abstract yang. BattleCry of Freedom, McPhearson (1988). The best Civil War history in the past generation that also lays bear how much of what we view as modern crisis in the U.S. ( partisanship, horrendous propagandized media coverage, etc ) is as old as the country itself.

If you want "crazy-to-grasp", you want Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, Gravity's Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Moby Dick, House of Leaves, etc. Not that "crazy-to-grasp" approximates "good" in any way.

Some authors and a rec or two for each. DFW - Infinite Jest Pynchon - Really anything, but in particular Against the Day, V, and Gravity's Rainbow. Rushdie - Shame and Satanic Verses, a lot of good other ones. Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon Gaddis - JR, hence my name. Heller - Catch-22

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)

Brothers Karamazov Gravity's Rainbow Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanance

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.

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

The Brothers Karamazov Gravity's Rainbow

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