/lit/ - Literature

What am I in for?

What am I in for Pinch bros? I already got filtered by GR about a year back, but I read some excerpts here on /lit/ recently and something clicked with his style, so I am trying again with Bleeding Edge. What is your one sentence pitch for the book?

Are there ninjas in this book?

I just read the dust jacket and kinda got a little hard ngl.
>It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but there’s no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of what’s left.
>Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethics—carry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into people’s bank accounts—without having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working mom—two boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhood—till Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitler’s aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.
>With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where we’ve journeyed to since.
>Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?
>Hey. Who wants to know?

Is this a good starter? Its more modern so my dumbass mind can get the references.

Is he a truther or mocking truthers? Seeing as aside from the dancing Israelis there's also a literal Montauk monster encounter.

And how about that regulation free Russian ice cream? Sounds good.

I just finished it.
It's a nice book, I didn't expect that the 9/11 would happen in chapter 29.
One of the themes, that this books deals, is the hope of a free Internet.
Like, when Maxine is at the DeepArcher, some hackers say that 'something is coming', people from the otherside, they will capitalized everything, they will destroy a dream. The book is kind of anti-capitalist too, with alot of critiques, and when the 9/11 happens, we go deep in a spiral of conspiracy.
The whole part of 9/11 comparing the World Trade Center with some kind of monument to the free market and the gods of capitalism. Comparing Marxism with relegion. The new religions of 21 century.
I was suprised with the programming references that poping all the time. I don't know how Pynchon made the research, but he did a good job. I didn't like when the book goes to the end, it's kind of boring, dialogues that doesn't go anywhere.

Let's dicuss this book /lit/. What's your interpretation?

What literature have you read that has been published recently, say within the last decade? Books of any kind, novel or otherwise, fiction or non-fiction.

I ask because I, to my recollection, have not read anything at all published later than this

>Bleeding Edge
>its not about an edgelord shitposter suffering from hemophilia

BRAVO TOMMY

How did a 75-year-old man manage to tap into the atmosphere and concerns of the early 21st century so accurately?

So are all the allusions to the Montauk Project, Mossad, the Russians, etc just dead ends? Is it an examination of geopolitical conspiracy and paranoia or is he hinting at something?

Is pic related good? How does it compare to Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon?

I just finished this. I had read V. and TCOL49 before, but this one was my favorite. Probably because I was a CS major for a year and got a lot more of the jokes and the culture. It's also way easier than the other two, with a single central character and simpler vocabulary.

What am I curious about is Pynchon's use of the words secular/karmic in this book. It reminded me a lot of how he used animate/inanimate in V. He kind of twists the definition to evoke a complex idea and repeats the theme throughout the book, using one to contrast the other. IMO, secular referred to official explanations, karmic referred to what truly happens that the secular covers up.

Bleeding Edge general too I guess

What if Pynchon is actually the new owner of 4chan using that Asian guy as a dummy
Sort of like the stuff in this

Should I get the paperback or hardcover?

So what is the projected conspiracy in this book? For its page by page simplicity it feels like there are more plot ambiguities and loose ends than Gravity's Rainbow. Who the heck did 9/11 in this book, and why?

Interestingly Pynchon's most skeptical conspiracy novel is also his only one tackling a fully non-fictional conspiracy. In V. and Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow we may not get exact answers, but the conspiracies feel more like allegory anyways, but here ...

Any thoughts on this book in general? I've heard a lot of anons on here defending it, I am curious to see their side of things.

I don't get it, and I don't like it.

Is this one of Pynchon's worst? I've read Lot 49, Inherent Vice, and some of Bleeding Edge. I'm really not getting Bleeding Edge so far. I want to try V. and GR eventually, but if it's like this, I think I'll pass.

ITT, the worst books by your favourite authors.
Pic related.

What shoud i expect?
Is it good?

I just picked up bleeding edge because it was 5 bucks at the bookstore. the plot appeals to me more than any other of pynchon's books. should i start with this or the recommended crying of lot 49?