Just finished reading Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis. It was good.
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As a middle aged recliner uncle, I enjoy reading nautical things. Today’s book is Tranquility: A Memoir of an American Sailor. It’s about a young mildly-experienced sailor dude in 1997 who, on a powerful whim, decides to buy a boat and sail from Seattle to California.
It’s starting out as a darling tale of charming confessional idiocy; in Chapter 3 the dude has just dropped five grand on the first boat he found, and he’s got it out in the Sound and he’s having difficulty shifting it into reverse. He opens up the works and discovers the motor mounts are mostly rotted through, the engine is sitting loosely on its platform, kinda held in place by the driveshaft. and instead of shifting it he’s actually pushing the engine around.
Can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
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Finished Tranquility. It was solid. Total bildungsroman. Fakes at being a heroic journey but turns out to be a catalog of dumb things one can do with a boat, which is much better.
Onward to The Places In Between. the story of a Scottish high achiever and war veteran who walks across halfway across Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, in 2002, right after the Taliban went into remission. And he’s walking through bumfuck Afghanistan, the places that are completely remote and ungovernable even by Afghan standards. It’s an interesting book so far but this being 2025 I should probably read some Afghan voices afterwards, so if anyone has recommendations.
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Finally reading Heat 2
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new pynchon already sold out when we went to the bookstore at lunch… chagrined but also pleased to have been defeated by anyone queueing at 8am, feel like the panel at the end of a shonen manga arc where a defeated villain goes “stronger.. i need to get stronger…!”
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Reading Madame Bovary now. I have not read much French literature, but I am already interested in how the iconic realist novel treats its middelclass subjects differently than English authors have.
I think next year I will focus more on books in translation.
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Shadow Ticket mostly confirming my suspicion that I like ‘minor’ pynchon over ‘major’ pynchon
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I also tried to get Shadow Ticket from my local bookshop but all they had were the paperbacks. No! I shoulda pre-ordered like it was a new video game.
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i found it at the same suburb mall i saw megalopolis at after commiserating with a few different people who’d been looking in the city center… god forbid the wh smiths have any tables not heaped with copies of the new richard osman, or as he’s known in jp, richard cannon dancer.
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i’ll accept that against the day ain’t all that
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Against the Day was a pretty fun read. But it was obviously going to be a book that I need to read twice to really have any solid idea about it. And how likely is it that I’m gonna read it twice? Well, more likely than some of the other books I’ve read in my life, I’ll say. In fact I hope one day I do because I think there’s something to it that I think is going to make it worth my while.
I’ve only read Bleeding Edge and TCoL49 (is that “minor” Pynchon), and really I have loved everything of his so far. Maybe except for most of Slow Learner.
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Former yes, latter no
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My guess is “minor work” is not really actually useful. But I’m curious what qualities make people see one of his books as minor and major. Evidently it’s not size. It’s not the book’s proximity to genre tropes (Bleeding Edge and TCoL49 are in many ways kind of the same detective story). Is it really just books released after a certain period in his career?
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i mean for me it definitely is size
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This is how I was personally thinking about it too.
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see, don’t feel bad pynchon, some people like the little ones!!
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major to me are the long ones + lot 49
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I pretty much love all the ones I’ve found readable which is everything but V and Against the Day
I think Inherent Vice is possibly under-read because of the movie which is imo among PTA’s worst
Against the Day feels like one of those “living up to the criticism” situations in that GR is way easier to read despite its infamy
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This is pretty much the consensus as far as I’m concerned.
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iirc, V is pretty long but should be considered minor as it is bad.
against the day is probably my favourite at this point. i don’t think inherent vice is a very good book, but had enough in their for a great movie.
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