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Gumbywan

Randolph "Dilda" Carter

A rant about books, horror, and the weird.  I sometimes take on my love/hate relationship with goodreads and Amazon.

Currently reading

Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories
Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, William Shatner
Progress: 140/336 pages
Pavane
Keith Roberts

Truly Appalling?

Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon

I'm about 80% finished with Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon and I have to say it is just awful.  Dull to distraction.  The problem is not that it is all that bad as parts.  There are multiple threads and some of them are quite interesting, written in distinct styles, but there are others that are just dreadful.  The other problem is there is little to no connection between the various plot threads and I don't have much hope that they are all going to come together or resolve (the latter isn't always necessary, after all real life does not "resolve").  However I get the distinct impression that Pynchon had the guts of about six different novels here and made an attempt to combine them in a less than satisfactory way.  I have the sense it is like the side of The Beatles' album Abbey Road where there are a bunch of incomplete good/great songs just sort of appended to each other.  The result is less than satisfactory here (unlike Abbey Road).

 

I have to admit it is a challenge to finish this one.  I just don't care about anyone or anything anymore and the historical framework makes the outcome somewhat inevitable.

 

Oh, and encyclopedic fact checking that advances neither character nor plot is just pretentious.