So I'm stuck in an airport for the next... 20 hours. Some of that will be used to eat and sleep, but I want to dedicate this time to reading. Which of these should I read (other candidates include Gravity's Rainbow and Nietzche philosophy). I just spent the last couple hours reading The Crying of Lot 49, I kind of feel like writing, but a part of me thinks I should continue reading.
Also, CoL49 thread
>>8138910
Lolita you will just have to hide your hard on. Mockingbird is too close to mockingjay and hunger games are as gay as aids. Poetry is not really airport reading
What was 49 like?
>>8138959
Very funny at times, but I've refrained from looking anything up, so I'm still trying to piece some of it together.
Read Lolita for sure, who cares what other people will think, you will never see them again. Also Lolita is amazing and if you have it in front of you I have to urge you to read it.
Also I just read tcol49. I don't really know what to think, it wasn't nearly as hard to grasp as I had been led to believe and if gravity's rainbow is as tough as people say than tcol49 is hardly a necessary prerequisite. I can't shake this feeling I have that it would make a better movie than novel, which is weird because I've never thought that about a book before.
>>8138910
Dont waste your time with Pynchon, read the poetry and the other novels - dip into Nietzsche but realise that he was kind of a quack.
With any time left head to the airport bookstore and buy something that was written pre-1950.
>>8139504
What did you get from it? I heard post modern stuff about it, so I thought it was about how everything is prescribed a different meaning depending on who is looking at the symbol, and the crying of lot 49 is all the literary critics getting together and deciding what it meant collectively.
lump
>>8140454
I saw it as a much more straight forward story with a clever way to end it on a way that will make you think and perhaps provide your own closure, I read somewhere that a theme that he tried to employ was the idea of entropy, seeing as the story becomes more and more convoluted as it goes. But apparently he reflects on it as kind of ham fisted in that regard, and I would probably agree.
I did enjoy it though.
What did you end up reading?
>>8139504
People usually give lot 49 as a prereq because they figure you should be at least vaguely familiar with early Pynchon before jumping into GR, which is fair, but V. is better to read first because thematically GR is practically a companion piece to it.
