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/lit/ - Literature

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Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:14:51 2018 No.11801694 [Reply] [Original]

This is absolutely the most difficult book I've ever read. Infinite Jest and Ulysses can't hold a candle to it. What the actual fuck was any of this. What was your first experience like reading Gravity's Rainbow /lit/?

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:17:54 2018 No.11801705 Well I'm on my first read right now actually, a little under halfway through. Definitely a bit difficult or confusing at times but I'm just going with it. Enjoying it so far.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:20:09 2018 No.11801712 >>11801694 I tried reading it when I was too autistic to make friends in Freshman y'ear. Studies got too much so dropped it. Would get back in at a later date.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:27:59 2018 No.11801743 >>11801694 read the first page, realized I have a life, dropped it

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:28:08 2018 No.11801744 >>11801694 It's easier the second time, neat book.

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:43:18 2018 No.11801803 >>11801694 I think in terms of difficulty: 1. Gravity's Rainbow 2. Ulysses 3. Infinite Jest

>>	Anonymous Mon Sep 17 19:45:27 2018 No.11801810 >>11801694 is this one actually worth reading? The other two are clearly very good with Ulysses being much better than IJ but the latter still being interesting.

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 02:31:01 2018 No.11803075

Currently on my first read through and there are entire pages where I have no idea what's going on. I'm at the bit with slothrop and his adventure down a shitter. It's funny but I have absolutely no clue what's happening, what a Kenosha kid is or why it had letters to him. But then I read the line about micro turds

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 02:32:52 2018 No.11803078 It was fun as hell it was 5 years ago and I've never had that much fun reading since. should probably just throw in the towel now. literature ends with gravitysrainbow

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 02:45:26 2018 No.11803108

First time I picked it up I was fucked up on anxiety, I couldn't hold attention for the first page so I reread it for several times, got to page 5 doing the same thing and I dropped it after an hour or so trying. Came back to it 5 months later, I was clear-headed and focused, and I became obsessed with it and its ideas, I read it before my class started at the library during summer. I must have reread each single page more than 5 times. It is one of the most fun I ever had, I related to almost all the characters, and I liked them all like people. I was genuinely moved by it. Slothrop is like a hero to me.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 03:12:56 2018 No.11803159 Just read chapter summaries so you know what is going on and it's not so bad.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 06:27:40 2018 No.11803642 >>11803075 That's the best part yet

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 06:38:26 2018 No.11803669 File: 10 KB, 600x480, 1465712874001.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11801694 English is my second language and I'm doing just fine reading it, OP is a fag

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 06:41:13 2018 No.11803682 My first experience of reading Gravitys Rainbow involved me thinking 'this is a poor man's catch 22'. It's not that hard compared to Finnegans Wake or The Ambassadors

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 07:11:48 2018 No.11803772 >>11803075 That is a tough chapter, but it's basically designed to be better understood in retrospect.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 07:49:50 2018 No.11803918 ulysses is much harder than this book by a loooong shot

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 08:06:41 2018 No.11803978 >>11803918 agreed

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 08:15:27 2018 No.11804007 I'm reading it for the first time now. I'm enjoying trying to keep track of everything and making sense of what's going on.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 08:39:20 2018 No.11804077 >>11803078 >>11803108 >>11804007 >how to get away with telling people you’ve read a book you didn’t understand: ‘it were really fun m’lud!’

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 09:46:03 2018 No.11804291

>>11801694
>>11801810
>>11801803

STEM-fags who haven't studied classic anglo literature think Ulysses is harder than GR, whereas people with no STEM or lit. background will probably find the language to be harder in Ulysses. The plot is a fuckton more complicated in GR than in either IJ or Ulysses (actually more complicated than any book I've ever read) and Pinecone just adds more and more. Every single plot line fragments into several and sidetracks constantly throughout the novel until nothing is left of where you started out. Compare that to IJ which is smoth sailing after 200 pages basically.

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 10:13:30 2018 No.11804372

>>11803669
same, but GRs difficulty has nothing to do with language you mongolerooni

>>11803918
I'd say it depends. Once you understand the techniques joyce employed each chapter (for instance, joyce writing in the style of different writers [defoe, newman, etc] as the 'evolution' of the english language in the hospital chapter [oxen of the sun? can't remember]), what was at first very hard becomes much clearer and easier to understand, not to mention quite a bit of chapters are pretty clear, like the first ones up to nausicaa.
GR so far, for me, its an all around mess, its like tom is guiding you through the story inside a rollercoaster, sometimes very fast paced, somethings unexplained or implicit, lots of crazy/funny/bizarre shit going on then suddenly a beautiful description of love or inocence.

>>11803078
I have never been as impressed since I read ulysses and FW, but 'fun', I had a lot of it in V. and what I expected is turning out to be true: GR is even more fun and extremely bizarre that a guy can go that far on coming up with shit like that, which impressed me since V. Scenarios, characters, situations, paranoia, conspiracy, places, timeline.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 11:13:37 2018 No.11804720 File: 58 KB, 800x678, 1523300092046.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11803682 >It's not that hard compared to Finnegans Wake

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 11:44:08 2018 No.11804859 i love it when dummies try to discredit people who don't have hard times with baby toys by saying "you just looked at all the words on every page, you didnt ~really~ understand it"

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 12:34:56 2018 No.11805113 File: 29 KB, 220x303, boo.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11804291 GR's plot is remarkably simple though, just long and stuffed with plenty goofs and gags

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 14:05:51 2018 No.11805570

I tried reading it, I think, 4 or 5 times now. The furthest I've gotten was Slothrop swimming through shit, that chapter broke me and I decided to leave it alone.
Right now I'm studying for a test coming up and will usually read GR before going to sleep, except when I read it I feel like my brain was fucking wiped clean of all information I've learned by studying so I'll probably leave it alone until after the test.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 14:09:03 2018 No.11805588 >>11805570 Also, despite reading through the same chapters 5 times in a single year, they're still just as enjoyable as the first time, the thing really has a weird charm to it. "Have ya got any gum, chum" makes me laugh every time

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 15:31:31 2018 No.11805923

>>11805113
That’s how I see it on a second read. On a first read, I could see being baffled by it. But overall, yeah, it’s a surprisingly straightforward “whodunnit” with the MacGuffin of the 00000 with such a ridiculous amount of digressions and additions and tangents on the side fleshing it out.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 15:42:35 2018 No.11805951 >muh references Oh good I love opening like a dozen more wiki tabs on top of the usual couple hundred for the like 15% I don't already get

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 15:48:36 2018 No.11805975 I'm about 100 pages in and whilst I'm having some difficulty with it I strangely don't find it frustrating. Helps that it makes me laugh a lot.

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 15:53:30 2018 No.11805997

Reading this a second time after about a decade and it seems at least for the first third you just have to have read Schrodinger's What is Life or at least be familiar with the whole idea of life being this epic outlier in the universe's statistical trend towards disorder. tl;dr - just watch a KA vid on entropy or some shit like that

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 17:56:31 2018 No.11806606 >>11805997 Or you know just read Entropy

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 19:17:53 2018 No.11806968 >>11803682 >a poor man's catch 22 i've never been so triggered in my entire life

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 20:10:41 2018 No.11807145 >>11804077 True. >t. I literally do this all the time.

>>	January !MrMnqxS.bg Tue Sep 18 20:36:23 2018 No.11807236 >>11801694 >Ulysses can't hold a candle to it. Good to know you've spent all of 5 minutes with Ulysses.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 20:39:50 2018 No.11807252 >>11801694 Second time is actually redeable.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 21:29:10 2018 No.11807446 >>11806606 Or you know just shut the fuck up, asshole.

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 21:46:15 2018 No.11807502
File: 6 KB, 533x148, AF7A630E-4546-4FA5-8481-BBC43C16E4D2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

I’m that guy that only reads non-fiction.

There is nothing better than a nice read of Gravity’s Rainbow. It contains vast symbolism within technical engineering and mathematical concepts within a uniquely historical world.

In part two, problems of Game Theory arise and are suggested in the casino.

With the Dodos parable, vast questions of moral significance are posed with human territorial expansion.

Your ability to comprehend the text increases as you learn other languages, including mathematics.

Pic related.

Tbh I don’t know why the pseuds here even discuss. Everyone is like age 20 or something. This is a Book best understood by people in their thirties, or at least mid twenties if you’ve lived an intensely academic life.

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 22:02:53 2018 No.11807559 File: 123 KB, 1318x741, reddit.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>11807446 It helped me.

Anonymous Tue Sep 18 22:28:59 2018 No.11807652
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>But there is a mad exuberance, as with inanimate objects which fall off of tables when we are sensitive to noise and our own clumsiness and don't want them to fall, a sort of wham! ha-ha you hear that? here it is again, WHAM! in the cephalopod's every movement

>>	Anonymous Tue Sep 18 22:43:35 2018 No.11807718 >>11801694 Hehehe the penis is a rocket metaphor.

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