Difficult Books

[Keith Davis]

Gravity's Rainbow changed my life...

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 11:27 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>wrote:

> Isn't it Garth who said it changed HIS life? Anyway, I think a life
> that can be changed by reading Heidegger isn't much worth living.
> (Perhaps in English it isn't just as unreadable.) And David, I
> wouldn't touch the Phenomelogy of the Spirit again in my life. What's
> very much worth reading, in my eyes, is the Critique of Hegel's
> Philosophy of Right by one Karl Marx. These are ten pages or so that
> changed my life.
>
> J
>
> 2012/8/9 Madeleine Maudlin <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com>:
> > Emily over at Publisher's Weekly, she recaps her ten favorite most
> > difficult, and she says at the end of her Being and Time blurb that it
> > changed her life.
> >
> > That's frikkin awesome!  How is, how did, what, is there, hold a moment,
> can
> > I, existential phenomenology has a winner, and what I would like to do,
> does
> > anybody know this Emily lady, Mr. Kohut do you know her, can I get her
> email
> > from you?
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:36 AM, Madeleine Maudlin
> > <madeleinemaudlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> I find the I Ching very difficult, borderline incomprehensible.
> >>
> >> Also, I had a rough time completing Dan Brown's Lost Symbol.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 7:09 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> One of the two folks who wrote the 'most difficult' list, Garth, did a
> >>> nice piece on Women & Men not long ago.
> >>> I have a stored copy somewhere.
> >>> I have a friend who knows him and I got to meet him in the most
> >>> superficial way at a big book event once.
> >>> Nice guy, genial at this.
> >>> Lookout Cartridge, started within the last pentade, read so much like
> >>> Pynchon in the beginning, to me, mentally touched reader as we know,
> that I
> >>> stopped out. The anxiety
> >>> of readership. That should be a recommendation and is although I have
> >>> failed my own reader-response.
> >>>
> >>> From: Phillip Grayson <phillip.grayson at gmail.com>
> >>> To: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
> >>> Cc: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; Keith Davis
> >>> <kbob42 at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >>> Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2012 12:40 AM
> >>> Subject: Re: Difficult Books
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:27 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Can anyone give a Pynchonista's appraisal of Joseph McElroy? He's
> >>> never really made it onto my radar but sounds intriguing. Worth it?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I've read Smuggler's Bible and Women and Men.  Smuggler's Bible was
> good,
> >>> but I don't remember it especially well a year later.  It's a lot of
> nested
> >>> stories that compound on each other and add and play off themselves.  I
> >>> remember liking it a lot, but it wasn't too earth-shattering.
> >>>
> >>> Women and Men, on the other hand, definitely does deserve to be on a
> list
> >>> of difficult books.  It's superlong and very obliquely told, difficult
> to
> >>> follow, but in my opinion worth it.  The topics and themes and what
> can be
> >>> discerned of the plot are all really interesting.  There're astronauts
> and
> >>> operas and all that good stuff, and the prose is very good, if
> difficult to
> >>> parse at times (the perspective just changes unannounced and pretty
> >>> constantly, so there's a lot of retracing your steps after being
> confused
> >>> for half a page), and I actually enjoyed it a lot.  It's much more
> staid and
> >>> less accessible than Pynchon, and I found it more effective and
> enjoyable to
> >>> just let a lot slip by with a befuddled look on my face and trust that
> it
> >>> would resolve itself later on in the story, and for the most part it
> did.
> >>>
> >>> It's a real experience of a book, it took me a few months to read it,
> and
> >>> I prolly went through six other (shortish, funnish) books in the
> meantime
> >>> just to take a break from it and feel literate again, but I found it a
> >>> really unique and interesting book.  I'd be loathe to recommend it,
> just
> >>> because it is so huge and such a slog, and I can easily imagine someone
> >>> hating it, but for me it was worth it, and I'd bet if you could get the
> >>> e-book and just open it every day and approach it as a short avant
> garde
> >>> work without having to hold 5 pounds of it in your hands it might be
> easier
> >>> to get after.
> >>>
> >>> I guess that''s not too helpful at all, but that's my experience with
> >>> McElroy.
> >>>
> >>> phllp
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> >
>



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