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Comment by everly | Hacker News Reader

If you want to like Pynchon but are daunted or put off by Gravity's Rainbow, start with Bleeding Edge (2013)

Bleeding Edge might be of particular interest to the crowd here because it blends perspectives from at least 60 years of engineering, from the slide rules and rolled up sleeves of Pynchon's younger days to open source and web 2.0.

I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.

I really liked TCoL49. It’s a weird feeling, reading I constantly felt like the author was making fun of me, like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it. But I had so much fun that I just didn’t care; I wanted him to trick me into believing the whole meant something, because the trip was worth more than the destination.

That book really opened up history for me, it would be interesting to pair that with 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' since so much of our knowledge of world history is based on third or fourth or fifth hand accounts.

> like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it

I believe Pynchon is the grand master of telling Shaggy dog stories. Norm MacDonald was a huge fan of Pynchon, it feels like they had/have very similar humor.

The shorter later novels are not difficult but don't bring the full banquet. I still really enjoy them. As a character my wife and were quite fond of Maxine in Bleeding Edge. I immensely enjoyed Against the Day, which is big enough to get the full effect but not quite as anarchic. As with Ulysses, I hated it when it 'ended'. Keep going, the ride's fantastic! Mason & Dixon has got the dialect problem, which has to be mastered to grok what's going on.

I didn't find The Crying of Lot 49 that difficult. However I am still annoyed after 4 decades I notice post horns too easily.

it's even on coffee bags: https://barrio.la/trystero-coffee/ a conspiracy, i tell you!

Radiohead's fanclub: W.A.S.T.E.

Bleeding Edge is amazing. I think it gets some flak for being a bit more surface-level than his better known works, but his prose is great as ever and some parts are genuinely chilling.

Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.

If you want to like Pynchon stop. You shouldn't "want" to like anything. Where is this internal pressure coming from, and how can you get rid of it?

... why's it bad? I've repeatedly put in the work to appreciate things that weren't initially appealing, and it's been rewarding pretty much every time.

Uh, because it's an obvious status-game with a pretense of intellect that fails to garner approval from normal likable people as well as the kind of person who likes literature, who will in turn feel obligated to out-Pynchon you?

I think... you're bringing a lot to this discussion that wasn't there until you introduced it.

I feel like that arrangement of words is almost conveying something.

Yes it does.

It says that a lot of uneeded assumptions and other baggage regarding "wanting to like something" as it relates to social pressuse was hurled at the grandparent, based on an simple suggestion for which work to get if you want to ease yourself in to a writer's body of work.

The intention of the grantparent was simply to suggest some accessible work a new reader of said author might better appreciate.

Regardless of that, wanting to "get" an artist and dig deeper into their work should be lauded, not scolded. "Social pressure made me read Shakespeare or listen to Miles Davis" would probably count as one of the best uses of social pressure.

We could use more of that, and less of "I only consume whatever I feel like at the moment based on myself alone, I will never consider artists and writers well-liked by others, praised by critics, or part of a canon, and try to get into them". Which is solipsistic, besides being impossible in general.

And who said status-games aren't useful, both for the invididual and for society?

Not just in that the individual gains status, but also in seeing status-seeking as a motivation for improvement, better social cohesion, and so on?

Perhaps not all kinds of status-seeking are good (e.g. seeking status as mafia mob), but your dismissal throws the baby with the bathwater.

It's a knee jerk reaction to dismiss status-games as bad. Evolutionary and socially they certainly serve a purpose.

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