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Comment by bigboxthrw | Hacker News Reader

good god. reading all these comments of how most have rarely made it past a small part of the book, how it is incomprehensible, how it is just like 2 other incomprehensible books, simply because the author decided to bury the reader under obscure and occult references to make them feel stupid instead of putting the book down and saying what crap. the book clearly sucks but you can't say that in polite company and must use a throwaway account. but you all know it is true.

if that style was actually writing it could support writing short stories. why are these incomprehensible train wrecks of words always thousands of pages long? what is the author hiding behind the verbal gush?

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The book is 760 pages. That’s slightly less than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It is a standalone book, too, so no need to read a series of books to prepare (each of those could be 100s of pages as well!). In terms of plot-per-page, Pynchon is extremely efficient, if what you want is content. There are tons of characters and many subplots.

It certainly isn’t “thousands of pages” long. Novels are by definition long-form stories. If what you want is a short story, a novel is never going to be a good fit.

I don't think the page count is a good metric here. For me, to comprehend something like this, I have to read, pause, ponder "what is going on?", reread etc. Sentence by sentence. For something easier, I can read fluidly.

As a contrast, picture Neal Stephenson novels. Long! But I can read them ~5x faster than an equiv length of GR.

I agree, page count is a bad way to judge books. I was using the parent comment’s logic, which disparaged Pynchon for writing long novels and implied that long novels are less valuable.

I echo your point. Neal Stephenson is an equally deep thinker and leans into the hard-sci side of things but his prose is very lucid. Reading his works is less arduous than you expect. The more I read the more I grow to dislike unnecessarily elaborate writing.

the author decided to bury the reader under obscure and occult references to make them feel stupid

The author lays on a banquet of fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying episodes to astonish and entertain the reader, and maybe inform them about some things they might not know about. It's not a test, if this style doesn't appeal to you, you don't have to be anxious or defensive about it.

I've read the book twice, decades apart, and it gave me great joy each times in very different ways.

I can see how this text causes some to experience the opposite of joy.

Both experiences are valid. But like there's not some big conspiracy of people who claim to like this book or this writer as a facade. They say it's great because, for them, it's a wonderful and meaningful experience.

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