How "difficult" is this?

It has sections that are separated, I guess you could call those chapters.

It has four sections and plenty of breaks within those sections demarcated with blocks, like this:
□ □ □ □ □ □ □
It's not as hard as people say it is, but you really shouldn't take more than weeklong breaks from it since nearly everything is tightly interwoven and you'll need to remember a lot of names, places, ideas, other stuff. It's the most fun I've had reading since I was a kid, you'll love it.

kindle user?

nah, Penguin Classics, the one with the V2 blueprint

The only hard part of the Pynch is his obscure, unconventional prose. Other than that he usually goes out of his way to make sure you can understand his point provided you can keep up with his diction.

If you can handle something as obscure as Ulysses, then you shouldn't have a problem with GR. Although i'd recommend reading Entropy and perhaps The Secret Integration first, as it can clear up a lot of confusion and are both really short

Just read it and remember to have fun.

Especially part 3, it's very funny and crazy. Don't forget to try and read some of it while DUDE WEED LMAOING(and then go back and reread that section).

It's a riot. Tremendously fun and featuring some of the best writing in the English language. Not terribly difficult, but improves significantly upon rereading.

Not sure if it's high art though. Strikes me that this book in 100 years will sound like Vanity Fair does now: very funny, dense, stiflingly overstuffed with obscure, forgotten material-historical references and ultimately pointless. If Thackeray teaches us nothing and only shows us a sociopath, Pynchon is about the same. Sure he's making statements about metaphysics in a post cause and effect world heralded by the rocket, but it's hard to tell what the point of the book is beyond "shit's crazy."

I read it as a teen and enjoyed it, but certainly didn't get it. If/when I reread it, I'll pay much less attention to the plot, and just have a good time- that seems like a better way to approach GR.

From Wikipedia:
>Also notable among the later novels is The History of Henry Esmond, in which Thackeray tried to write a novel in the style of the eighteenth century, a period that held great appeal for him. Not only Esmond but also Barry Lyndon and Catherine are set in that period, as is the sequel to Esmond, The Virginians, which takes place in North America and includes George Washington as a character who nearly kills one of the protagonists in a duel.

Not only does Thackeray have a GR equivalent, in his later years he wrote his equivalent of M&D.

(((Coincidence?)))

>How "difficult" is this?

I found it more difficult than Ulysses to be honest. In fact, I found GR almost unreadable and I admit I gave up around page 250. I guess I'm a pleb. I still like Pynchon though. Loved Mason and Dixon.

Ulysses was more difficult for me since the prose is really fucking irish sounding, and the references to parnell/irish history/culture/dublin geography were more difficult to handle without the annotations handy