Aggressive Reading Crew discussion

To get myself going again on this challenging literary milestone (I read about 2/3 of it years ago and then left it -- accidentally, I swear -- on an Amtrak seat in D.C.), I used an Audible credit to pick up a recent re-recording by audiobook god George Guidall. I expect to go mostly with audio at least through the first of this novel's four sections. It's entitled "Beyond the Zero," and in my Google epub, which appears to be taken from the Penguin version with the blueprint rocket plan cover, takes us to page 137. Or, in the 1973 Viking Compass paperback edition (originally $4.95!) I found on eBay and snapped up for something in excess of original list, for reasons I'll outline later, Part 1 takes us to page 177. However many pages that translates to for you, should be doable by end of April, eh? Yeah...

I'll create more folders as needed for our ongoing notes, impressions. Aggro members should be enabled to post and create additional folders (let me know if you're not). Please share insights/hurdles! Have a good month. JW

Yay! I just finished "The Power" by Naomi Alderman (highly recommend) and was hoping we'd get this started soon! I'm looking forward to discussing this with y'all.

Book dedication: I knew that Richard Farina had something to do with Joan Baez, but did not know that he was Pynchon's roommate at Cornell. Interesting article, which makes me want to hear his Greenwich Village folkie efforts and read his (only completed) book:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

So, I'm about eighty pages in, depending which edition I consult. Been alternating between the Google epub and the audiobook. One alternately pulls ahead and I turn to the other to catch up, so in effect hearing/rereading everything twice -- which probably isn't enough! I don't generally recall a lot of detail from fiction, but most of it is coming back -- yet visually, and in overall tone, the book is different this time. Because I'm literally a different person than I was in the mid-90s when I left that unfinished copy on the train? Whatever the reason(s), the meta-meta-pomo wisecracks are still there, including cascades of juvenile and obscure cultural minutae. But the scenes I remembered before starting the reread, including the banana breakfast in the old hotel, Roger Mexico's sports car and the abandoned house he shares with Jessica Swanlake in an evacuated, forbidden London neighborhood, it's all pervaded for me this time with the sadness and pathos of war. He conveys this more in breathtaking scenic depiction than in the contorted, silly verbal and mental meanderings of the main characters. And all of it delivered in declamatory waves of incantation not unlike the verbal sweep of Walt Whitman. Possibly hearing the magisterial reading of George Guidall brings this rhythm to the reader's attention. Plus, as a bonus, Guidall sounds almost exactly like Edward Everett Horton, who some may remember as the narrator of "Fractured Fairy Tales" in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.

As several multiple-run-through readers of this difficult book advised, really don't stop to look everything up the first time, and don't give up when you don't understand a strange, abrupt segue. Instead, plug on, as it's probably going to pop up in further iterations later on that explain it to the patient reader. This is the time for aggro reading, if ever there was a time, in other words!

Though, to the extent that one can't resist looking up references, the best no-cost online GR assistance module I've found is at:

https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki....

Especially the Annotations by Page tab. And of course the ebook has built-in dictionary and web search capabilities. Happy haunting...