Can you read Thomas Pynchon's Vineland without reading any of his other books? And are there any prerequisites to reading his works? Any ideas or things you need to know to understand his works? I know it's just loosely inspired but I wanted to read it before i watch "One battle after Another".
>>24748822Just dive in.
>>24748822>Can you read Thomas Pynchon's Vineland without reading any of his other books?Yes.>And are there any prerequisites to reading his works?Not really. I wouldn't recommend Pynchon to a new reader, but there aren't any specific prerequisites, no.>Any ideas or things you need to know to understand his works? Uh, a general knowledge of everything would help lol. For example, look at this passage I read today in Bleeding Edge -- if you didn't know what Pokemon was, it might be a bit confusing, but it wouldn't make it impossible to read. And since we can't know everything, all you can do is dive in and enjoy what you can.
>>24748830BE is one of his most difficult books. He is an author who uses pop culture and the time the book is set in to inform style but in BE the time it is set in is a time which was consumed by pop culture and he exploits that a great deal with it being used for development of theme and part of theme. Vineland is considerably easier.
>Can you read Thomas Pynchon's Vineland without reading any of his other books?sure, I've also only read two of his books prior to reading Vineland
>>24748822I wanna read this because the book cover looks like black metal album art
>>24748822You can, but there's a minor reference to The Crying of Lot 49 which you won't appreciate without having read that novel. And TCoL49 is short anyway, so you may as well read it first.
>>24748822>h-h-hi guys I don’t really read but someone told me that DiCaprio movie is based on this and so I want to carry it around in public for a bit but I want to get my story straight when I tell others about how I don’t often read Pynchon
>>24749241Harsh but fair. OP, read Crying of Lot 49 or V. for your first Pynching session.
>>24749241OP is going to break into the single digits this year, when was the last time you did that?>>24749764The proliferation of such advice is probably why zoomers and half of millennials can't read for shit. You have never let yourselves get caught up in a world you can't even begin to understand, seen the possibilities; you prepare for everything, look it up online and make sure you are doing it "right" and are pathological about it. Some things in life require just taking the dive and risking failure or you just end up a 30 year old incel. When it comes to fiction, as long as the vocabulary is mostly within your grasp, you are good to go. V. is a sprawling mess (that I love) and was Pynchon diving in and taking the risk, he was way over his head but diving in paid off. Lot49 only has the artifice of Pynchon, only representative of a few of his early short stories. For the older reader, GR was generally our first Pynchon and a lot of us read it in high school when we had no chance of understanding, but it showed us the possibilities, that literature could create a cohesive and incomprehensible world completely alien to anything we had experienced. We were as lost as Slothrop (which is part of the point of GR) but unlike Slothrop we knew the answers were there.
>>24748830What the fuck is going on there?
>>24749900Easy, pal. I started with Inherent Vice because I love Paul Thomas Anderson and was just getting back into reading after college. Now I've read everything except Bleeding Edge and Against the Day and wish I'd started with one of those two.
>>24749910Kids being kids, being weird and alien to their mother because they are caught up in their own culture and can't understand her Jennifer Anniston haircut. It is not so confusing in context but Pynchon really goes all in when it comes to pop culture in BE and he puts the conspiracy aspect—that made up part of the book he uses to fuck with the reader and is a part of all of his books—in the popular culture. >>24749914Your missing or ignoring my point to say "trust me bro" only goes to serve my point.
