Why don't women read Pynchon?

[grladams at teleport.com]

Barbara Hoffert from Library Journal seemed to like it
-Jill

Against the Day
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal — November 21, 2006

Descending in balloons on the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the do-gooding
young Chums of Chance (part of a worldwide brigade) get help from White
City Investigations' Lew Basnight. Lew is soon off battling anarchists in
the American West, where bad guys Deuce and Sloat do in Webb Traverse,
whose daughter marries Deuce and whose son is escaping this accursedness at
Yale. Meanwhile, the Chums float through the center of the earth to the
Arctic, where they are alarmed to discover a scion of the robber Barron–ish
Vibe family excavating a dangerous artifact. And that's just a minuscule
part of the action in this grand Wellsian fantasia from the author of
Gravity's Rainbow, whose skewed look at history is a powerful act of
imagination, bending the rules (with quartz translucence figuring in
somehow) to reveal "worlds which are set to the side." Written in packed,
densely detailed prose too dryly smart and ironic to be called Baroque, the
narrative has its longueurs, and different readers will likely take to
different story lines (this reader was partial to the balloonists). But
pick up another book for a break, and it will seem relentlessly ordinary.
Brilliant if sometimes exasperating, Pynchon's latest is highly recommended
for any library that takes its fiction seriously, with the warning that it
does not yield easy pleasures and should not be read on deadline. [See
Prepub Alert, LJ 8/06.]



Original Message:
-----------------
From: David Morris fqmorris at gmail.com
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2006 13:49:24 -0600
To: anville.azote at gmail.com, jf at hatguild.org, pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: Why don't women read Pynchon?


On 11/30/06, Anville Azote <anville.azote at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/30/06, Jasper Fidget <jf at hatguild.org> wrote:
> > Anecdotally, it was a woman coworker who first introduced me to Pynchon.
>
> Ditto.

Ditto (woman not coworker):  It was Laurie Anderson's song "Gravity's
Rainbow" from "Home of the brave."

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .