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Dec 16, 2009

mary rated it:

so imagine you're browsing through a bookstore on a lazy saturday afternoon.

you stop in the pynchon section, and there, out of the corner of your eye, you see this *guy* and he's checking you out. you think, wow! this is one for the movies! does this actually happen? (this is a sexually oriented biased review, sorry)

you proceed to chat, laughing at the length of gravity's rainbow. and you go next door with your new books to grab a cup of coffee, which turns into dinner, More...

12 comments like (114 people liked it)

Jan 26, 2012

Stephen rated it:

My first excursion into the Pynchonesque…and it left me disorientated, introspective and utterly confused about how exactly I feel about it. I’m taking the cowards way out and giving it three stars even though that makes me feel like I’m punting the responsibility football and doing my best imitation of an ostrich when trouble walks by.

I am going to have to re-read this. My assumption is that I began this book taking Pynchon a little too lightly. I decided to start my e More...

86 comments like (72 people liked it)

Jan 28, 2012

Ian rated it:

Appetite for Deconstruction

Most readers approach a complex novel, like a scientist approaches the world or a detective approaches a crime - with an appetite for knowledge and understanding, and a methodology designed to satiate their appetite.

“The Crying of Lot 49” (“TCL49”) presents a challenge to this type of quest for two reasons.

One, it suggests that not everything is knowable and we should get used to it.

Second, the novel itself fictionalizes More...

25 comments like (27 people liked it)

Jan 29, 2012

Kemper rated it:

I really want to like Thomas Pynchon. I love the whole brilliant but reclusive author act, and all the cool kids at the library seem to think he’s the cat’s ass. But I’m starting to think that he and I are never going to be friends.

I tried to read Gravity’s Rainbow twice and wound up curled up in the fetal position , crying while sucking my thumb. Supposedly, this is his most accessible book. It was easier to read than GR, but easier to understand? Well…….

Oedipa Ma More...

22 comments like (19 people liked it)

Mar 17, 2008

Dusty rated it:

I'm if anything a fussy writer. The sort of guy who prefers to come up with excuses why all the factors surrounding the writing of some story or chapter aren't quite right, rather than actually sit down and let the thing get written anyway. I like to worry sentences, and I like to worry about sentences that sound like other sentences I've read so many times before. "She got out of the car and looked searchingly up at the sky." There's some piece in me that could never be satisfied with More...

12 comments like (22 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Aerin rated it:

There was a point about halfway through this book where I was certain that it was by far the coolest thing I'd ever read. Protagonist Oedipa Maas, trying to untangle the many confusions of her role as executor of an old lover's will, attends a production of an old Jacobean play called The Courier's Tragedy. In it, a postal carrier for Thurn and Taxis, the official mail system, is attacked and murdered by representatives of Trystero, which seems to be a rogue underground postal system. Suddenl More...

4 comments like (24 people liked it)

Sep 03, 2011

Oscar rated it:

¡Una locura!¡Una tomadura de pelo! Estas, y otras, son las expresiones que se te pasan por la cabeza mientras lees esta delirante novela de Pynchon. Mientras vas leyéndola, no puedes dar crédito a lo que te está contando ni a los personajes que ta va presentando. Pero, como si de un sumidero se tratase, o de un maelström, no puedes evitar quedar atrapado en su brillante e inteligente historia.

De inicio los nombres son curiosos, Edipa, su marido Wendel "Mucho" Maas, el docto More...

1 comment like (8 people liked it)

Mar 02, 2008

Martine rated it:

I'm not sure how much I care for Thomas Pynchon's brand of postmodernism. On the one hand, The Crying of Lot 49 contains interesting ideas, culminating in a weird trip down Paranoia Lane. On the other hand, the writing is so detached and plain weird that it is hard to emotionally invest in the characters. As a novel of ideas, then, The Crying of Lot 49 has some merit; as a reading experience it's rather less rewarding. It feels like a 200-page story crammed into 127 pages, and that's not a compl More...

1 comment like (19 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2011

K.D. rated it:

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is the shortest novel of Thomas Pynchon,an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. You should see his more voluminous other two novels, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Mason & Dixson (1997) and you will have the urge to read The Crying first to test if you will be able to understand him. So, yesterday, I tried.

My main problem with some authors of satire like Salman Rushdie (at least in The Satanic Verses) More...

3 comments like (5 people liked it)

Apr 21, 2010

Manny rated it:

"So, what do you think it's about?" she asked, as she took a preliminary sip from her cocktail. "Entropy, to start with," he replied. "If only he'd known the Holographic Principle. It follows from thermodynamic calculations that the information content of a black hole is proportional to the square of its radius, not the cube, and the Universe can reasonably be thought of as a black hole. Hence all its information is really on its surface, and the interior is a low-energy More...

10 comments like (19 people liked it)

Jul 21, 2008

Jackie "the Librarian" rated it:

Update: I finished re-reading this, about a week ago. I wanted to let my thoughts percolate before committing to an opinion here. My verdict: Nope, still didn't like it much, but I didn't hate it so much this time. I took it slowly, going back to re-read passages to make sure I had the characters straight. There are a LOT of characters, all with weird names that seem to have significance, but don't. Ha ha. Fun.

Okay, fine, Pynchon fans. I'll give you that it's an interesting plot - th More...

9 comments like (12 people liked it)

Feb 02, 2012

Ian rated it:

I'll be the first to admit, The Crying of Lot 49 contains some of the most confounding sentences I've ever encountered in fiction. But when I'm not tearing my hair out trying to understand paragraph-length sentences about entropy and thermodynamics, I was utterly enthralled by the postal conspiracy that Oedipa Maas tries to unravel. Reading Pynchon's prose is like cracking some secret code - something Oedipa herself tries to do with the cryptic post horn symbol.

Do I fully understand More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 13, 2011

Pf87 rated it:

(revised 5/28/11)

The characters are cartoons, the setting's dated, the plot is a black hole of self-deception and anticlimax, and the faintly ridiculous authorial voice is clearly Pynchon screaming at us that he phoned it all in, but I don't think it's ever mattered less. The fact that there exists a work of conspiracy literature that is complex, intriguing, believable and funny, has a point to make, makes it without ever talking down to the reader, does it all in under 200 pages, an More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Sep 08, 2008

Holly rated it:

I have never quite read a book like this before...a book I had to take notes on, and a book where I was left wondering if it was necessary or not in the end. The names and places thrust upon you while reading tease the corners of your mind...beckoning you to associate, connect, describe, make sense of it..because that is what our brains do in the end. We fill in breaks and gaps with logical connections that may or may not be real, and to me, this book questions that practice. Are we the cause of More...

3 comments like (6 people liked it)

Dec 04, 2007

Brian rated it:

This book was strange on a lot of levels. Though it is short, every word counts. Most authors tend to fluff out their stories with lengthy descriptions, and details. This is the book that would result if you boiled it down to the bare-bones narrative. Only what is necessary to drive the plot remains, and you're forced to give ample weight to each word on the page. Something I admit to being unaccustomed to doing.

After a bit of a learning curve to really focus on what was being More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 03, 2011

Ashley rated it:

This book epitomizes exactly what bothers me about postmodernists. You could spend your life decoding all the images and symbols and patterns and names and places and endless conspiracy theories that Pynchon has so densely packed into only one hundred and fifty pages; you could think and think and ask yourself "What's real?" to infinity; you could do that, sure, but all that effort would essentially be pointless, because in the end, none of it means anything, because there is no meanin More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 08, 2011

Jeremy added it

I've never read Pynchon before, but his style, those winding, iridescent sentences seem like an important reference point for a lot of American authors who come after him, people like Don Delillo, Donald Barthelme, David Foster-Wallace, Johnathan Franzen, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson etc. He's able to synthesize obscurant historical references, pop culture, conspiratorial paranoia and drug use into this funky, swirling melange. It would almost be a kind of metaphysics, if it wasn't so kooky a More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 22, 2008

Adam rated it:

A slapstick parody/send-up, resembling Kafka meets the Marx Brothers, of sixties culture; targeting psychology, the military/industrial complex, right wing whackos, movies, literature, and views of reality and history. One of Pynchon’s lightest and most inconsequential works (though not the worst which is Vineland); and his most dated (it just screams “written in the sixties). The fun lies in digging through his wealth of allusions and references (Jacobean drama, psychology, The Beatles, science More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jul 12, 2008

Juliana rated it:

Ok, so I didn't actually read this book, but I did try. It sounded cool from the description, and I've often come across references to it. Amazon.com recommended it to me, and I tend to agree with their recommendations. I generally give a book about 50 pages to hook me, and this book just irritated me more and more as I went along. I found the "ironic" wordplay more annoying than funny. Some of the characters seemed like they had potential, but not enough for me to care. I think I got More...

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 02, 2008

Ricky rated it:

Harold Bloom (and apparently everyone else I know) is clearly out of his G.D. mind. This book is not hilariously funny. I did not appreciate the humor in this book at all. I liked the bit about the play but the book seemed too cutesy and gimmicky to me. I've been looking at reviews all over and (much like the reviews for the film No Country for Old Men) I seem only to find the same old enthusiastic descriptions of the book and no compelling reason for why I should appreciate the longest 183 More...

1 comment like (10 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2008

Scroutch rated it:

Damn damn damn. I really wanted to find the specific copy I read in order to illustrate the veracity of the maxim "Never judge a book by it's cover." My copy of "The Crying of Lot 49" was super psychedelic and featured Oedipa Maas dancing while the drummer from the teenage rock band is rocking out in a technicolor paisley dreamworld. Actually, now that I've thought about it, that's not really a bad depiction of the book itself. If only the writing had lived up to the concept More...

6 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Catherine rated it:

I have one statement regarding this book.

"The Salad of Despair" is perhaps the most useful phrase I have read all year. Thank you, Mister Pynch.

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Jan 05, 2011

Benny rated it:

Whee! Funny names, funny book! I was afraid initially that there wouldn't be much beneath the humorous surface, having had no prior exposure to Pynchon and so not knowing what to expect. There is, thankfully, and I think you can run with it as far as you like, reading it as a critique of American something or other, a personal tale of a mixed up love-confused woman, or a political satire (see below for my miserablist interpretation).

It's a funny book that isn't written in a funny way More...

5 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2011

Angus rated it:

Disclaimer: This is not a review. This may have spoilers. Read at your own risk. Visit original post at Book Rhapsody.

***

Intro

I bought this book the same day that I bought my violin. January 30, 2009. My superstitious self tells me that I shouldn't have bought this book with Karl Johan, my violin; I should have seen it as a portent.

A portent of what? That I would not be able to make Karl Johan sing. That I would abandon my classical music pursuit. More...

14 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 26, 2011

Erik rated it:

During the last semester in college I became involved with Janny, one of the most intellectually challenging persons I've ever been close to. Many of the more important books read since then were either ones she owned, she spoke of or she gave to me.

Her copy of The Crying of Lot 49 is the only complete book I've ever read by Thomas Pynchon though Rick Strong got me to try V later while we were both living in New York City. That was too much like Joyce's Ulysses. Crying, however, i More...

13 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 17, 2008

Emilie added it

George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778 or 1780–February 29, 1860) was a Afro-Polish-born virtuoso violinist, who lived in England for much of his life. He was born in Biała in Poland. His father, John Frederick Bridgetower, was probably a West Indian (possibly Barbadian) servant of the Hungarian Prince Esterházy (Joseph Haydn's patron), although he also claimed to be an African prince. His mother was from Schwabia, probably a domestic servant in the household of Sophie von Turn und Taxis.
More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 20, 2008

Anna rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 13, 2008

Matt rated it:

I very much enjoyed this book, but who knows to what extent I connected it with it. At some point, at a really young age, I used to love looking at my dad's chemical engineering diagrams and stencil tools. They were one my favorite things to look at and play with. I had no idea how they worked. My relationship with this prose is hopefully at a deeper level than that, but I can't help but wonder how much closer.

Pynchon nails feelings of self-suspicion and mistrust of one's own brain f More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

May 20, 2008

n* rated it:

A really excellent introduction to Pynchon's complex, abstruse, brilliant, bilious, hilarious storytelling. If you're trying this one out for the first time, here's a hint: make a cheat sheet as you're reading of every character other than Oedipa. Every time you learn something about that character, make a quick note. Use your cheat sheet as a bookmark, and keep up with it, or you'll find yourself at page 25 with no idea who you're talking to or why. If you do it right, you'll find the kind of r More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 10, 2008

Krystal rated it:

After numerous attempts, I have finally achieved what I once thought to be an impossible task: reading a Thomas Pynchon novel. Admittedly, his shortest and "most accessible", yet I still feel some pride at actually getting through it - and more than that, enjoying it. At first I tried reading it in small chunks, letting the page-long sentences wash over me without trying to figure out what was going on. Excruciating method that I do not recommend. Finally, this weekend I decided to rea More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)