The Deep Reads
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon · A Season
The paranoid novel. A screaming comes across the sky, and for seven hundred pages Pynchon never lets it land. Rockets, cartels, Pavlovian conditioning, and a war that turns out to be a front for something worse, all watched by a man who comes apart as the plot closes in around him. It's the hardest, funniest, most rewarding book on the whole list, and the one this program is basically named after. Read it slow, read it with the annotations open, and let the paranoia do its work. Seventy-three episodes. One a day.
How it works. One episode a day. Pynchon splits the novel into 73 short episodes, marked by the little squares between sections — read to the next break and stop. That's seventy-three days, about ten and a half weeks. Go by the section breaks, not the page count. Page spans key to the standard Viking / Penguin edition.
Read with these open. Gravity's Rainbow is built to be annotated, and you shouldn't do it without help. Keep the Gravity's Rainbow Guide and the PynchonWiki page-by-page beside you and check them as you go. Every allusion, every song, every rocket is glossed there. Don't fight the book bare-handed.