JR

you are retarded. nothing is hard about it. except when the characters speak in anther language. time for Google.

Just alot of words I don't know, English is not my native language.

Just wait for the last two hundred pages or so

No, especially if you're not a native English speaker. I don't judge you in the least for finding it a challenge.

Oh I finished it a while back. Hell of a book. It hits all the bases I want in a big novel.

maybe, there are parts of JR that I find just as sad as The Recognitions if not more so. The whole Bast storyline is pretty grim in respect to both the character and what it says about art; and the section with Gibbs and his friend at their apartment getting drunk is also fairly soul crushing.

and don't worry about the haters, The Recognitions is a difficult book, there's no way around it. There's a site online that helps a lot with the allusions (especially the religious ones which tended to go over my head). Once you're about 50 pages in or so it "clicks" and becomes a lot more fun

Took me 3 weeks to finish over the summer (juggling work/social) I stopped when the whomever was speaking stopped. Follow the guide at williamgaddis.com if you're lost

the problem with the website is that there's loads of spoilers. I remember one of the annotation went something like: "This is an allusion to character X killing character Y 700 pages from now."

Same

user, I'm on the same boat as you as well :-( But I have been taking longs breaks and starting with different books because it kills my motivation to keep going.

holy fuck same thing happened to me with the site lmao

This is also true

i just got through arguing with a guy who called Gaddis cliched and childish, and it really bothered me. i figured i'd come here for closure since i like to get other opinions from people who may or may not like it as well. anyway, he claimed that the first pages are ridden with cliches, such as the masks with wyatt's mother, and he complains of the satire of wyatt's family, (which i didn't think of as satire, and that satire isn't even a bad thing in any right) he then complained that the mithra segments were vulgar, and that the characters were flat. it surprised me, since i had felt the mithra segments were fresh and new, and a play on the typical christian lore being twisted this way or that, and the characters felt quite fleshed out to me, strange and unpredictable, flecks of human sparks throughout even in the dometimes excruciating dinner parties. so i simply asked him who he liked from the 20th century, and he mentioned joyce, and i felt trolled. i mean, joyce is the master of cliches, reworking and rehashing all our beloved cliches and farting them back at us, in a cuck story as old as time, for chrissakes! wonder what you guys might think of all this, those who have read gaddis.

clichéd no
childish fuck yes

but who cares. it's those childish parts of his book that are so funny. like when the guy posing as a doctor kills someone or when a certain character shits in another characters piano. although agape agape wasn't childish.

I usually read 2-3 scenes at a time.

you're right, there is a childishness at times, a comedy, i guess i shouldn't be upset over it, i just was surprised someone could enjoy Joyce, and really not love Gaddis.

I honestly cannot imagine someone that would get through that entire book and be offended by the vulgarity of the mithra sections
I don't remember it being particularly bad at all, and I've never met someone triggered by obscenity in books other than religious moms that think their kids need to be protected from Catcher in the Rye

I dropped it after reading the first two pages. The prose is complete garbage.

But I'm sure you're brilliant enough to be able to understand it anyway *sniff*

it really did seem to be pretty petty. i dunno, can't please all of the people all of the time. certainly doesn't stop me from loving it.