Hey /lit, I apologize in advance for the meme-ing, but how does The Recognitions weigh up to Gravity's Rainbow in terms of difficulty?
Somewhat related:
Is Infinite Jest easy compared to Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow?
>>7516007
yes
very much
>>7516007
Yeah, IJ was a breeze compared to either of those. The first 200 pages or so might take you a little longer, but it's a pretty fun, fast-paced read overall.
b-b-bump?
>>7516007
Joyce is a special snowflake.
He's not like other authors.
why does it matter
why don't you read the two and decide yourself
why don't you fuck off
The Recognitions is an easier read. More difficult than IJ, but less difficult than Gravity's Rainbow. Gravity's Rainbow has some really obtuse sections, and while The Recognitions has some complicated structure, it doesn't come close to GR.
That said, I liked The Recognitions way more than GR, and I liked JR by Gaddis even more than both of them. Gaddis is awesome.
>>7515989
Books are not difficult. Just time consuming.
>>7516639
Reading JR now and loving it. Savouring every line.
Is The Recognitions a depressing book?
On a related note, how difficult is Women and Men in relation to Recognitions and the meme trilogy?
>>7518305
Women and Men is harder than any of them. Not only is a pain in the ass to get an actual copy of the book, but the structure is nuts and I think it takes tons of effort to figure out what the hell is going on. McElroy is a true madman, but a genius.
>>7516007
IJ is much easier and a guaranteed finish after 200 pages
Gravity's Rainbow is essentially drowning the first 100 pages, then the rest of the book is a breeze until you realize the first 100 were the most important
Ulysses is boring as fuck
>>7517245
Yeah, but it's also very funny. Black comedy.
>>7515989
Harder and more cryptic.
>>7518428
rilly now
why do people always worry about how hard a book is
gravity's rainbow is a psychedelic action movie
the recognitions is a page-turner
ulysses is fucking hilarious
People get so worried on /lit/ about following charts to "get into" authors and reading the greeks because of a book's supposed difficulty that they never actually read what they want to read.
>>7516639
I started JR and I'm really struggling with it, I breezed through Gravity's Rainbow and loved it but I just thought it a fair amount of attention (kinda read like a prose-poem about a Bosch painting made in the '40s). JR I have to focus and give it more attention than I ever have with a previous novel.
In fact, I don't remember struggling at all in GR except the occasional line where lightbulbs are speaking to eachother out of nowhere.
>>7518860
Dunno, the 3 mentioned here are a toll but not nearly as much as other titles. I read anthropological books and ethnographies. I know its specific shit but if people really want to practice their reading comprehension they should try that epistemology
>>7517245
Incredibly.
>>7515989
The Recognitions is an easy book to read, just not an easy book to fully understand. There are some sections that'll require a slower pace of reading in order to more than just glean the gist of it, but you can pretty much always tell when it's a section like that. Just shift gears and you'll be fine.
>>7516646
What a retarded platitude.
>>7518312
>Women and Men is harder than any of them. Not only is a pain in the ass to get an actual copy of the book, but the structure is nuts and I think it takes tons of effort to figure out what the hell is going on. McElroy is a true madman, but a genius.
Shit, the more I read McElroy praise, the more I'm prepared to shell out $75 for the fucking book
>>7516007
Really the only difficulty of IJ is the fact that its fractured enough to require a second reading. Wallace was pretty big on novels requiring some work on the part of the reader to get through, without overly obfuscating the narrative or being too cloistered and academic.
>>7521825
Just wait for the reprint. Should come out this year. Or buy his other shit for like 3$ off amazon.
>>7516007
Infinite Jest is by far the easiest part of the meme trilogy, yes. It's also the longest though, so you'll inevitably forget a lot of seemingly inconsequential but ultimately relevant details from early on by the end of the book.
>>7515989
>bought Carpenter's Gothic
>flipped shit over how quality it was
>Agape Agape arrived in mail recently
i'm saving Recognitions for last
>>7521847
Is a reprint confirmed? I know Dalkey Archive has published like everything else he's ever written, but that one fucking book is still out of print forever
>>7515989
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>>7522893
Don't any of you feel like idiots for actually falling for these meme authors and books? You all sound like a bunch of faggots.
>>7522905
good post
>>7516639
The Recognitions requires a ridiculous level of study to get anything from it, Gravity's Rainbow doesn't have an extremely important reference to itself or other text every sentence or two. I finished GR in three weeks during the summer of 11th grade. I've been reading R for three months (eleven years later) and am just about to finish I.3. I dread reading it.
>>7522951
I thought GR had a lot of references to engineering and astrology, as well as V.
>I finished GR in three weeks during the summer of 11th grade.
I wonder what would lead an 11th grader to read GR.
>>7523024
It does. Also Kabbalah, statistics, chemistry, linguistics, Calvinism, Rilke, Pavlov, etc.
It's a lot easier to spot all of these things on a second reading.
>>7522951
What sort of things does it reference? What works should I be familiar with to understand Gaddis' text?
>>7523049
http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml here's a good little guide to help you along
>>7523024
To be fair, I was studying to be an engineer.
>I wonder what would lead an 11th grader to read GR.
I wanted to piss off the provincial exam markers by going over their heads. They gave me a perfect mark for that year's exam, which was some grimdark garbage I threw together so I could go on a date.
Their only guidelines for the senior exam was it be written in prose, and contain some sort of analysis and/or synthesis related to the text and the given theme; GR was the most surreal and complex popular book (so that it could be graded, an essay on unknown novel cannot be graded) I could find, so I stretched the theme to apply to it and wrote in a completely sardonic, dry manner.
It worked, mine was one of the last dealt with according to a teacher I knew who took part, and knew about my plan.
Why? I wouldn't be able to as an engineering student.
>>7523049
http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trsource.shtml
