The 200 Greatest Adventure Novels of All Time

[Danny Weltman]

Someone's a fan of the word "apophenic," I guess.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 12:44 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 154. 1963. Thomas Pynchon’s apophenic adventure V. — published on the
> cusp of the Sixties. I am fascinated by fiction from ’63 — including
> YA lit — in so much of which we find a volatile admixture of
> seriousness (not earnestness) and irony. In Pynchon’s début novel,
> which details the picaresque exploits of schlemiel Benny Profane and
> the Whole Sick Crew, in and underneath New York, characters in search
> of a plot (in the paranoid sense of the term), jazzman McClintic
> Sphere articulates Pynchon’s cynical-yet-innocent worldview: “Keep
> cool but care.”
>
> [...]
>
> 165. 1966. Thomas Pynchon’s apophenic adventure The Crying of Lot 49.
> California housewife Oedipa Maas uncovers a centuries-old conflict
> between two mail distribution companies; or perhaps she’s detecting
> signals where there is only noise. “The ordered swirl of houses and
> streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same
> unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she
> knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there
> were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed
> meaning, of an intent to communicate.”
>
> 166. 1966. Richard Fariña’s comical picaresque Been Down So Long It
> Looks Like Up to Me. The adventures of undergrad Gnossos
> Pappadoupoulis in the American West, in Cuba during the revolution,
> and at an upstate New York university. The author was a folksinger who
> died in a motorcycle accident two days after this first novel was
> published.
>
> [...]
>
> 175.  1972. Ishmael Reed’s metafictional crime adventure Mumbo Jumbo,
> which is set in 1920s New York — locus of a virus known as “Jes Grew,”
> which influences people to listen to ragtime and jazz, dance, and be
> happy. (It also infects the book — whose format is disrupted by radio
> dispatches, photographs, drawings, footnotes — itself. Agents of the
> white, western, Christian hegemony attempt to suppress the virus.
> Other agents — including the Mu’tafika, who steal historical artifacts
> from Western museums and return them to their places of origin — work
> against the hegemony. PaPa LaBas, a Voodoo practitioner, is drawn into
> the conflict.
>
> [...]
>
> 178. 1973. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Set during the waning
> days of WWII, Pynchon’s infamous masterpiece is an espionage adventure
> revolving around the quest to uncover the secret of a mysterious
> device (the “Schwarzgerät) that is to be installed in a German V-2
> rocket with the serial number “00000.” (The book’s title refers to the
> parabolic trajectory of a V-2, as well as to the introduction of
> randomness into physics via quantum mechanics.) But the book is also a
> picaresque adventure following naive Tyrone Slothrop, a naive Allied
> Intelligence operative, as he wanders — under surveillance — around
> London and Europe.
>
> [...]
>
> http://hilobrow.com/adventure/
>
> Thanks, Doug Millison!
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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