I'm Against It

I'm still in the middle of reading Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon. SHould have listened to J when he wished me luck (he gave up after a few pages of Gravity's Rainbow)This tome is over 1000 pages long, and it could kill someone if I threw it at their head. It's a real pain in the neck to read while standing on the subway, not to mention the space it takes up in my attache.

Michiko Kakutani really hit the nail on the head with her review, that it "reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex." However, it still puzzles me how this book made the Top 100 Notable Books of 2006.


As much as I hate putting down books in the middle, I'm very tempted. This book is too convoluted, has too many characters, and just seems too outrageous and fictional to be even remotely possible. Its historical-science fiction bent reminds me of Neal Stephenson, without the adherence to a central theme and the quality of writing that I'm used to with Stephenson.

Will I make it to the end???