Reviews and Comments

Finishing reading this really validates Pynchon being my favorite fiction author. Massive in the way the Gravity's Rainbow is, but more focused on key themes and the two protagonists here. The bond formulated between Mason and Dixon feels so real and beautiful.

I love the tall-tale untrustworthy narrator in this, and the idea of half-truths scattered through out bonkers story pieces.

This is truly a treasure of the mood of an early America (just before the Revolutionary War kicks off), in way that it depicts real historical and social feelings of the time so richly and remains real. Pynchon continued to be the master of this type of thing, I guess, and the idea of the Preterite is very alive here still (and even more close to its religious origins).

Maybe I'll do a blog post or more thorough writeup on this one sometime. There's a lot to peel away!

A man was maddened by the ticking of a pocket watch so he ate it.

Started listening to the audiobook of this while doing yardwork and stuff.

Chapter 29 was very very good - really brought the feel and paranoia of early American parapolitics in poetic fashion.

Taking a step back from some other technical stuff to get sharper with Perl by beginning this from the start (never finished through it) while I dig through a bunch of code in parallel :)

Reading this after V is very interesting - much more of a "chill" experience while still getting to some very core "mortal coil" subject matter. I found the recent pieces with the interactions between Mason and his father touching.

Nice short read, crossing boundaries between the analytical and the existential. Was looking for something chess-related and this itched that scratch, but also was very emotional. People pour themselves over the board given the right circumstances.

The end stuck the landing really well on this one. Liked it a lot for very early Pynchon - you could really feel the formulations of ideas used with his later works, albeit these are a bit more scattery.

“ Let me interject for a moment - What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is

Lots of great ruminations on history and rich visuals of perceived landscapes of time, and how people graft themselves to different arrangements of time or try and transcend them. I’m liking the surging back in and out of scenes with The Whole Sick Crew a lot.