Earlier this week I asked about the best science books of all time.
Today, a related question crossed my mind: what novels do scientists like to read...and why?
A couple of years ago, I took a grad-school English class devoted to postmodern fiction. Six weeks of the thirteen-week semester were…
Sometimes fractured energies in our planet's noosphere can throw people together who, logically, should never meet. There's no rational reason I should count among my friends the particularly reclusive, Cologne-based science fiction writer and critic Mark von Schlegell; but, lo, kismet, I do.…
How great is this book? It's that great, that's how much.
But beyond superficial (and meaningless) qualifiers like "great," this book does a remarkable job of fascinating me, interesting students, and standing alone as entertaining fiction. I use it in my class on Science, Technology, and…
Via Rag & Bone Blog
By Christopher Tovo
Are we falling out of love with books?
I realized a little while ago - when yet another book arrived from Amazon and was thrown on the to-read pile - that I'm no longer the bibliophile I once was. I love the idea of reading books, but I'm not making time…
I wish the literati would give the guy a break. He's published two epic monsters in a row, let the guy have a little fun. I was thinking he was due for a shorter work, like a glass of orange juice after an all night bender. I just bought it and browsed through it and it looks great.
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-thomas-pynchon2-2009aug02,0…
"Inherent Vice" is Thomas Pynchon doing Raymond Chandler through a Jim Rockford looking glass, starring Cheech Marin (or maybe Tommy Chong). What could easily be mistaken as a paean to 1960s Southern California is also a sly herald of that era's end.... In classic Pynchon fashion, random incidents add up to conspiracy -- maybe. Behind powerful figures loom shadowy, more powerful figures, and complex layers of knowledge lead to confusion as much as clarity. There is also a lot of sex (if little romance), many pop-culture allusions (one scene references at least two classic noir films), characters who cross over from Pynchon's other work ("Vineland," predominantly) and silly names galore.
You just like Vineland because it reminds you of Yreka.
shit...shit...shit...I got distracted and stalled out in the middle of Against the Day last Spring...now must...catch up...
You just like Vineland because it reminds you of Yreka. You confuse Yreka and Eureka :) But yes, it does remind me of home.
I have been reading Gravity's Rainbow for a whole year now... I still read it.
The other night I picked it up again (after a week) and I realized with horror that I had no idea who these characters were... until I found out that that it wasn't "gravity's rainbow" but "against the day" that I was looking at!
"Against the Day",
Page 566
In a dreamâ¦
This passage, describing Kit's dream of Umeki and the message it conveys, pulls together many of the main themes of Against the Day, tying things together in a way that Pynchon seldom does, almost as if he's providing a rather large piece of the puzzle to help the reader understand the novel:
"Deep among the equations describing the behavor of light, field equations, Vector and Quaternion equations, lies a set of directions, an itinerary, a map to a hidden space. Double refraction appears again and again as a key element, permitting a view into a Creation set just to the side of this one, so close as to overlap, where the membrane between the worlds, in many places, has become too frail, too permeable, for safety.... Within the mirror, with the scalar term, within the daylit and obvious and taken-for-granted has always lain, as if in wait, the dark itinerary, the corrupted pilgrim's guide, the nameless Station before the first, in the lightless uncreated, where salvation does not yet exist."
My wife grew up in Vineland.
I must get over my disappointment that Amazon had this available for sale on Kindle (love mine!) but it was subsequently pulled.
I love longer Pynchon because there's more of it to enjoy!
Howzzat for an undeniable fact, eh?