2015 Reading Challenge [Closed] discussion

Here's my pick for this week, a lightweight by Pynchon's standards and therefore realistically readable in a week. The film was released last month, and it's still not out where I live. I also want to read this before I see it.

Here's the trailer: http://youtu.be/wZfs22E7JmI

And done. Yesterday, actually, only getting around to posting about it now. Inherent Vice, being Thomas Pynchon, requires some time to digest, though it is still by far the easiest of his novels I have read. The prose is recognizably contemporary English, the narrative advances in a linear fashion and there are comparatively few hallucinatory episodes.

This does not mean that the novel did not reward or, indeed, require, the reader to pay attention. Fortunately, for the moments my attention started to wander or when (often) Pynchon's frequent references to 60s American popular culture escaped me, there's the Pynchon Wiki: http://inherent-vice.pynchonwiki.com/...

Inherent Vice is a deceptively short novel. It's also incredibly dense, containing a crime story that keeps twisting and turning, more characters than I am strictly used to, and the usual Pynchon meditations on the nature of history and time, this time contextualized in the end of the 1960s.

It's a very rewarding book, an entertaining book, and to those intimidated by the mass of Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day or Mason & Dixon, a rather more approachable introduction to Thomas Pynchon's work.