Full disclosure: I don’t read for pleasure. A full-time proofreader, I spend the better part of the day staring down errant commas; “reading for pleasure” smacks of a cruel joke. What started as an observation of a new novel resting on a desk became an assignment to bear the brunt of a full-strength Pynchon onslaught in less than three weeks. But as my free time was enslaved by Against the Day (Penguin), I saw the world through Pynchon’s glasses: swirling with conspiracies, populated by vectors, thick with coincidence. My conversations progressed like six degrees of Thomas Pynchon, and that’s not an easy game. Twelve pages of notes later and feeling like a literary marathoner, I crossed the finish line with an appreciable high worth every brain-warping step.
This article appears in 2006.
