If you're going to read one book by Thomas Pynchon, read The Crying of Lot 49

Over the past three years, I've read them all.

I flew through the earth with The Chums of Chance. I kicked through California beaches with Doc Sportello. I don't even want to begin to tell you what I did with Brigadier Pudding.

I read every single one of Thomas Pynchon's unreadable, impenetrable, chaotic-hard-right-turn novels. And when I was done, I decided to perform this service to humankind:

I'd decide once and for all which one of Pynchon's novels you should read first.

I rated every one of his eight books on four scales. Order of importance. Personal enjoyment. Accessibility. And how well it introduced Pynchon's worldview and themes.

I tallied the results nervously. What brick-of-a-book would come out on top? Melancholy dark horse Vineland? The esteemed and reviled Gravity's Rainbow? Post-9/11 mystery Bleeding Edge? Perhaps my personal favorite, the epic American meta-fiction Mason & Dixon?

Man, it wasn't close.

If you're going to read one Pynchon novel, read The Crying of Lot 49. Besides Gravity's Rainbow, it's his most famous book. It's his shortest and among the easiest to follow. And it takes you on a whirlwind trip through all his major themes. The unsettling paranoia, the layered fictions, the sad sense that maybe America had something special once, but whatever it was it's been lost and it's not coming back.

After that, read Mason & Dixon. And then just see if you can stop yourself from finishing them all. I know I couldn't.

Thoughts on books I read in 2019

I wrote one of these year-end wrap-up posts in 2015. That was a huge reading year, volume-wise. I bet I read 40 novels. And I had an awkward conversation with James Ellroy, too.

This year, I only rated 19 books on Goodreads. And two of them - Mary Monster and Camille - were my own. (Spoiler alert, I gave them five stars.)

Point being, when I talk about the books I read in 2019, I'm talking about a pretty short list. However, two of the novels on that list are Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest. So I bet I read as many words as ever. They just added up to fewer books.

I think about this all the time. Life is so finite. Is it better to use two months finishing eight clever crime thrillers or reading one literary masterpiece that (as readers of either of the two aforementioned novels will tell you) doesn't finish at all, in the conventional sense of the term?

Reading Gravity's Rainbow was a bit like going for a long run. I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad it's over. I can now say I've read Pynchon's most difficult novel in all its disturbing glory. The highs were so high, but the lows, man... There is some sick stuff in there.

There's some sickness in Infinite Jest, too. It's a whole book about sickness, in fact. About our modern sickness: our obsessive need to be distracted. Some satisfy it through alcoholism. Others through seduction. And others through devotion to a cause, a sport or an entertainment. But all this sickness is surrounded by so much love, humor, and Wallace's empathy for all these broken people. Infinite Jest is maybe the only book I've ever read that made me want to be a better human.

I also read some Big Important American Novels like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Some genre thrillers like Head Full of Ghosts. Some European satire like Submission. And some modern stylists like Jonathan Lethem, who wrote the single most devastating sentence I've ever read, "We only feel we're floating because we're forever falling." I stared into my drink for a good 10 minutes after I read those words.

Perhaps the non-Infinite Jest book I remember best is The Elementals by Michael McDowell. In The Elementals, the heat is a character, the same way the cold was a character in Hold the Dark. In both books, the weather is an ever-present metaphor for meaninglessness and memory, for all the things you can't ever, ever escape. McDowell's Alabama coast is the loneliest, wettest, hottest place in the world. The heat weighs you down. The heat slows you down. In the end, the heat decides if you live or die.

Maybe I just have a thing for the weather.

New music about bugs and pavement and the inevitable march towards extinction

What can I say, I'm a happy guy. Production, drums and keys by Jeff of Of Heaven and Sea. Album photo courtesy of Kal at Unsplash. "Work for W.A.S.T.E." via Thomas Pynchon. Music, lyrics and guitars are me. Enjoy. Or don't. That's cool, too. Click here to listen on Soundcloud. Or view the video below.