Amazing

[Daniel Harper]

Sorry I haven't been posting much as of late, but work and various life
pressures have gotten a bit intense. (I'm looking at possibly getting a new
and much better job, but it's far from certain I'll get it. My fiancee, who
makes the majority of our household income, has been informed that she'll be
laid off in two weeks, which is causing no small amount of stress in this
houshold.)

But in my spare minutes, I've been working my way through V. (about 60% done
now), and I've found something remarkable: Pynchon's works aren't
intimidating anymore. Reading through V., I find there's a lot that I don't
quite understand, and the plot is convoluted as always, but the overall
themes and the linguistic turns used by P just come to me as if they were
written in a more "natural" way. I don't find myself missing whole sections
of the text because it simply overwhelmed my ability to absorb it -- I just
sort of read through the text and "get it".

At first I thought it was just that V. is a simpler book than the others,
but I picked up ATD and read a couple of random pages and found the same
thing was true -- bits that I found difficult or impossible before are much
easier now, and keeping my head on straight in the labyrinth plot isn't
impossible.

In other words, after reading some two thousand pages, including
four-and-a-half novels, three short stories (saving the end of SL for after
I finish V.), and several essays and articles, I'm coming to finally be to
the point of actually being able to read Pynchon. It's an amazing feeling,
and one that I would never have reached without just bulling through the
other books at least once (and the assistance of the wikis and the P-list to
keep me oriented didn't hurt).

On the other hand, after I finish V. there's really only one more book to
go. Sure, I'll be rereading this stuff for my lifetime, and I'll definitely
be rereading ATD and joining in on ATDDTA after I finish GR, but the
prospect of being in some sense _done_, with no more to look forward to, is
slightly disheartening.

In any case, thanks for all the help from the peanut gallery. And I'll be
around talking about P for awhile, I hope.
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