Is inherent vice a good entry book? Almost halfway through the book I find it boring and pointless...

Is inherent vice a good entry book? Almost halfway through the book I find it boring and pointless, am I reading it wrong? Isnt Pynchon for me? Is the book bad? Halp

it's a good book but not his best. it's really easy to read compared to V and Mason and Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow, which are not difficult once your tolerance and acumen is high enough but difficult to most readers...IV was my first Pynchon and i enjoyed it a lot, save the LSD dream chapter which i found tedious. Pynchon is a master. get off this board and read more

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if you find Inherent Vice boring and pointless I don't think Pynchon's your man. Inherent Vice is pure fun for me, without any of the mental strain of Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day. If I hadn't anything else to read I think I'd just be reading Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and The Crying of Lot 49 over and over until they put me in the ground. (or I finally grew up)

Against the Day causes mental strain?

I do not know, maybe it's my fault I bought it hoping it would be about the duality of counter culture, and the book looks, in my point of view, a satire of classic detective stories and an extended version of some less violent Tarantino movie. Did you find the beginning / middle of it boring or very slow?

I'm really trying, but chapters 7-9 are being painful. Am I suffering more than normal or are they really slow?

No, if anything I think it starts better than it ends.

How accurate is this chart? Is it actually good to follow?

none of these fucking charts are good to follow but this one i particularly bad the way it dismisses vineland, i would bet my life the creator of that image didn't even read the book he just heard DFW and critics of the time didn't like it

What I have read of Pynchon was in this order:
Bleeding Edge
CoL49
GR
M&D
and then I read Inherent Vice in order to compare with the film

As for my opinion and advice - IV was shockingly average, almost as bad as Bleeding Edge. I have no idea how PTA extracted a quality film from it, nor how the same man who wrote Gravity's Rainbow descended to such a level, and I recommend that if you want to read Pynchon, the only important works of his I've read are CoL49, GR and M&D. From general critical opinion, I would say that the only work other than these that is worth reading is V. though I have not read it myself. Seriously, Gravity's Rainbow is probably second only to Ulysses for twentieth century fiction, though I feel uneasy giving the top two spots to two very difficult and sprawling works, so lets say its third after Pale Fire and Ulysses, as Larry McCaffery suggests.
Anyway, yeah, basically just read GR. M&D is very good but the 17th century capitalisation is a cunt - I am a pleb for saying this but I simply could not acclimatise to it, I don't know what was wrong with me but it made the entire book rather stilted on a micro prose level, though that's not to say it isn't one of the greatest works by probably the greatest living English language (read: global) author nevertheless.
Also, I'm extremely drunk as I write this so if my comment seems incoherent or unconvincing please adjust your opinion of my opinion accordingly.

if you're a brainlet

pynchon is childs play

Bleeding Edge is great & you are a nigger

I read Lot 49 in highschool but I don't think I really "got" it. Then I tried to read V but gave up after maybe 80 pages.

Finally 6 years later I returned to Pynchon with IV and absolutely loved it and then went back to V and GR and now I'm just starting M&D.

I think IV is just Pynchon's version of a fun, page-turner, detective novel. It doesn't really have any "point" or deep meaning, so it's a pretty easy read but you still get some of that Pynchon esotericity.

On another note, does anybody else think that V is much more challenging than GR? Pynch sometimes gets a little long-winded in GR, but overall it really just flows and reads much nicer than V.

I would never recommend to anybody to start with V.

my experience with V. was unpleasant, however GR is fantastic. wondering where AtD sits, people often have very mixed feelings about that one.

I liked V. overall, but it was a challenge to get through for me. Especially Maijstrall's confession chapter.

I imagine I'll enjoy it more upon re-reading it someday.

same. it's usually fine once i have some goodwill for an author, trust him a little.

Also. I liked the book a lot but had mixed feelings about the movie of IV. Anyone else?

I thought it was a pretty good adaptation, considering the source material, but I thought Joaquin's acting choices were very strange, and not really how I pictured the character at all. It felt like he was doing a Jack Black impression through the whole movie. It's weird because I normally find him to be a pretty good actor.

Also, I remember thinking that like the first 50 pages or so were all there in the movie, but then big chunks of "subplot" started getting left out.

Is Vineland really that mediocre?

I dunno, I think he played it very similarly to how I read Doc.
I was also bummed that a lot of the subplot got cut, but desu it would've been even longer. The only thing I didn't like was the Newsome monologs.

compared to...?

To everyone saying IV had no point or deep substance: did you not catch the historiagraphy of the real estate market manipulations that completely transformed California from burnout paradise to the venture capital sink of the world? That the seedings of Silicon Valley and the 5k/month studio are found right there in Pismo Beach.

Fuck IV, is Against the Day good or not?

I'm enjoying what I've read of it so far. I think a lot of the hate for it here comes from the hippie characters.