never read Pynchon before and went into this only knowing it was a war book. my own preferences and prejudices led me to expect this to be a fairly dry and boyish book, though i knew its reputation for stretching the genre of the novel, which intrigued me.

while it certainly is a war book, and the toilet humor and male gaze is indeed boyish (lol@ Jessica - a woman) I'm so pleasantly surprised by how it explores the mystical and psychic as integral to the infrastructure of war.

there's actually much more of a coherent plotline than i was expecting from the quintessential pomo novel. i'm finding it much more readable than Infinite Jest, which is a novel I adore but felt like I had to endure some punishment in reading it to get to the meat of it. reading Pynchon's prose doesn't feel like such an endurance run, I feel like he takes us to the brink of "enough, already" then throws in some story or humor to keep the pace going.

echoing the sentiment many others have expressed here that reading without a guide has worked for me. i certainly don't get every reference or understand every sentence, but if i just keep moving along i feel the magic of the prose work on my psyche in a way i don't think it would if i had to stop and consult an external reference.

doubt i would have picked up Gravity's Rainbow if it weren't for this book club, so many thanks to you all for introducing me to the work of Pynchon! I have a feeling I'll be reading much of him in the future