Evan’s Reviews > Gravity’s Rainbow > Status Update

So far I'm having no trouble with this novel; I think there's a lot of fear mongering out there about its difficulty. Knowing a lot of the pop cultural references and some of the scientific concepts has helped. Really good insight about the psychological paranoia of war, which in the present situation of chaos makes it timely and relatable. For me, anyway.

Moving right along. Yeah, I'll finish this, the Lord or Zeus be willing.

Never dreamed I'd be able to to follow this book, but so far I am. Reading lotsa tough ones in succession has heightened the awareness. In any case, this is prime time for heightened awareness, innit? When they want the ones with heightened awareness dead. Pynchon is telling us in 1973 what's going on right now.

Outside shot to make it to page 100 today but just stopped short. Book is getting dense now.

Crutchfield seems partly a model for Judge Holden in McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but chatGPT tells me that's not the case. But here's where the human mind prevails over AI. The mind virus will not take me. So, we're in the first infamous scatological passage of the book. Naturally I was eating breakfast while reading it. haha. I'm following this blend of fantasy and "reality" somehow. Onward.

Three times farther into this than I've ever gotten before, so the mo' is rolling. A crazed state of being is the state to be in, for this.

Getting to the experimentation part of the book and the parallels to our current AI-technocratic-autocratic era could not be clearer. Pynchon is very prescient here.