Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

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CBR12Bingo – White Whale This might be the whalest of my white whale books. Heck, even as far as White Whales go, I have read Moby Dick a handful of times, and while it’s scattered, it’s completely readable to me. So this one though is all over the place. So while I have read this now, there’s a near infinite number of bits scattered all over my brain. To think of it as a complete text feels wrong, in the sense of reading it as […]

I just dunno, man.

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When I was in college, maybe summer after sophomore year, Thomas Pynchon was gonna be the guy I decided to love and get into. It was initially because his name and the cover of “V” drew me in and I have a fascination for long books and I was just convinced he was my guy. Turns out he’s an incredibly rewarding writer, and an incredibly frustrating writer. So books like V and The Crying of Lot 49 are both pretty frustrating and pretty rewarding. Crying […]

“Questions arose. Like, what in the f*ck was going on here, basically.”

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It seemed like a good point in the Cannonball to dip my toe back into the elite Infinity Pool of highbrow reading — you know, capital L Literature — and Pynchon seemed like as good of a candidate for Respected Contemporary Author as any of them. But then of course I end up reading the book of his where the protagonist is altered on one of the many favorite substances of the sixties for most of the book and it’s generally about crime and hippies […]

…And We’ll all Float on, Alright

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I like Thomas Pynchon – which is to say, I like the idea of Thomas Pynchon, more than the actual execution. My first experience of reading Pynchon was at university, as a first year English lit student. I’d never heard of Pynchon before and The Crying of Lot 49 was required reading for a course on 20th century American literature. It seemed easy enough; it only has 149 pages. What a deception that was. Still, I returned to class the next week, exhilarated if only […]



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