Completists' Club discussion

We begin with the visual:



And the quote (from the Moore IJ review):

While reading William Gass’s The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis’s Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies (Giles Goat-Boy, Gravity’s Rainbow, Gaddis again with J R, The Public Burning, LETTERS), went baroque in the eighties (Darconville’s Cat, Take Five, Women and Men, You Bright and Risen Angels), then raged against the dying of the light in the nineties with Powers’s Gold-Bug Variations and Gass’s massive masterpiece. Who was left to write such novels, or to read them at a time when some scorn such books as elitist, testosterone-fueled acts of male imperialism? For those of us who regard these works as our cultural milestones, not as tombstones in patriarchy’s graveyard, David Foster Wallace demonstrates that the encyclopedic novel is still alive and kickin’ it.

So but I've been completionizing this LIST for a few years now. Outstanding is are The Public Burning and the final 1/3 of Gravity's Rainbow. The Public Burning I hope to get to in the near future. GR, the reading of which's first 2/3 can't honestly be credited to me, is scheduled for 2014, or after I finish The Wake, whichever is cheaper.

Intended, also, is completionism of all authors indicated here, with the likely exception of Richard Powers, but he may eventually tag along as well.

Any takers?

I am doing my bit with one encyclopedic per month, Laura Warholic being the present wristwrecker.

If I'm any kind of man I'll read all of these books in my lifetime. I'll join your club if the fee isn't exorbitant and if you send me newsletters about your books and any parties or dances (soirees) you might arrange around them.

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Intended, also, is completionism of all authors indicated here, with the likely exception of Richard Powers, but he may eventually tag along as well."

So, for author completionizism of this set, The Score ::

John Barth
William Gaddis
Robert Coover
Thomas Pynchon -- just that outstanding rereading of M&D
D Keith Mano
David Foster Wallace
William H Gass
Richard Powers -- still not committed to him yet.
Alexander Theroux
William T. Vollmann
Joseph McElroy

Up next is either Coover McElroy. Maybe Pynchon. I really don't know what's happened to Gass ; I feel prodigal.