How would you rank Bleeding Edge among Pynchon's other works...

Gravity's Rainbow
V.
Mason & Dixon
The Crying of Lot 49
Vineland
Inherent Vice
Bleeding Edge

One time I told my brother people out there believe DFW wrote Vineland and that he was forced to fake his suicide to keep up the ruse.

what is the deal with the upside down badger?

Of What I've read

GR>IV>tCoL49>VL>BE

Gonna read M&D next I think

read V and stop overrating TCoL49 its easily his weakest

V is most overrated and weakest

read lot 49

I have. Don't remember a badger.

>Vineland is arguably his weakest novel

Why is anyone taking advice from this turbopleb hipster? His obsession with memes and cute little David Foster Wallace references should confirm the superficiality of the opinions. I bet this cocksucker didn't even read Vineland. fucking plebs make my blood boil

But Vineland is his worst novel.

it's honestly frustrating how good a writer pynchon is. i could easily spend the rest of my youth just reading and rereading his works, but there is not the time in the world to fully appreciate them all and there is still a whole life left for me to live and a whole lot of other great novels still to read

pynchon's corpus is a stroke of perfection and perhaps the greatest single piece of American art or culture

Is V. good/fun?

yes / yes

misspelled tcol49

Vineland is better than people give it credit for, though it does get bogged down middle to end. It's also more coherent. Reading ATD I got the feeling this was a massive clusterfuck sporadically written over decades that got touched up and pieced together with a lot of work by Pynchon and his editor. But maybe I'm wrong about that. I love his writing on a sentence by sentence basis but often find the greater aspects lacking.

Well, it's clearly better than Against the Day or Vineland.

I'd put it on par with Inherent Vice. I might even put it a notch above since it's a lot more impressive for him to write an IV-level novel now, as a geriatric recluse.

What do people who read it think about the present tense? Did you notice? I read about 40 pages and put it down. Not the type of Pynchon I enjoy.

>I'd put it on par with Inherent Vice. I might even put it a notch above since it's a lot more impressive for him to write an IV-level novel now, as a geriatric recluse..

are you fucking dumb or what? IV was his last novel before this one and it came out in 2010, if you're going to larp as a reader at least skim wikipedia before u post, clown

If I can't read the first chapter of Lot 49 without getting utterly disoriented, should I avoid Pynchon from here on out?

i guess readin' and writin' just aint for u, u probably got peasant genetics whiteboi

Why would you do that

It's okay, sort of like an updated TCoL49, but not among his best

does Vineland follow his "whole Sick Crew/Schwartzkommando" model?

Yes, but with negress ninjas.

it's like an early attempt at inherent vice, but relying too heavily on tropes of the era from mafia movies and godzilla etc. and its awkward because one can't be sure if he's being ironic or not, overall not too good, although the stuff with weed atman and that cop or whatever was a good enough portrait of youth protest movements which rang true to me even in the iraq war protest era

oh god forgot about that, he really worked in every cinema trope of of the 70s into that crap didn't he, dfw is a pseud but he wasn't too far off when he said vineland read like pynchon had been doing nothing but smoking weed and watching tv for the last 20 years between GR and the release of Vineland, i guess everyone thought he was working on another masterpiece that whole time then he comes with vineland lol

He had been working on Mason & Dixon as well during that time, so Vineland was probably just to remind everyone he still existed

Torquato Tasso

Vineland was probably just something he did to take the edge off writing Mason & Dixon.

No. Vineland is Pynchon's mature character novel. It's got the same high concept plot points as his first three novels, police raids, ninja academies, jail breaks etc. but they all feel peripheral, alluded to or broken off before the action starts. There's no Slothrop or Benny caught up in an unfolding plot because the plots have already happened. It's a long view of a time and place and intersection of lives. Pynchon actually writes well defined and human characters for once, and you see the novel's central events through their differing perspectives. The novel still has its shadowy corners, but the characters never address them. Vineland could pass for a wigged out Philip Roth.

Saw a guy with this book out at the bus stop today. looked like a proper fedora haha

You're not a real fan of Pynchon unless you look like one of his characters

GR > V > M&D (almost finished) >>> TCOL49 >> Bleeding Edge (reading)

Mason & Dixon
Gravity's Rainbow
V
The Crying of Lot 49
Against the Day
Slow Learner
Bleeding Edge / Vineland / Inherent Vice

Bleeding edge is the best book written that involves 9/11. The only thing better I have read are threads on /pol/.

go back to /r/books, faggot

I'm currently reading it and it's very good. All the spy stuff set at the turn of the 20th century is really fun.