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One of the best resources is the Pynchon in Public Podcast. They've dedicated seasons to Slow Learner, Inherent Vice, The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, and Bleeding Edge, and they're about to start V. in the fall.

Also, there are some admirable companions that can really help elucidate and contextualize his novels, especially for Gravity's Rainbow. The Pynchon Wiki is another terrific source of supplemental information.

And, of course, this community is always enthusiastically keen to help someone break into the realm of Pynchon's fiction. My advice: Read in whatever order you like, and accept that you won't understand everything that's going on in whatever you're reading in the first read. His novels are meant to be read over and over again, and you truly find something new and exciting in every subsequent read.

Happy reading, and welcome to the community.

P.S. What DeLillos have you read so far?

Thanks for the comment, very interesting stuff. Like all these other comments it's making me really look forward to reading the rest of Against the Day.

In general I am the same in that I don't generally feel the need to discuss it, and forums like these are incredibly restrictive for such things. My thinking with this post and the other I did was to give people who haven't read his stuff much a bit of a starting point and save them some time -- it took me five reads of Gravity's Rainbow before I felt I really had a decent understanding of what's going on, let alone the surrounding material/psychoanalysis/science/history, and I'm very aware that most people don't have anything like the time to do that.

It's the political/historical importance of some of his work that makes me feel most obliged to make these posts (hence my username) because I think too many people, especially somewhat complacent critics who write the reviews, are far too quick to say "conspiracy theory" without delving fully into some of the really nasty and real history it refers too. Of course his use of things like Hollow Earth/UFOs/Atlantis is a little different, but I do think it's crucially important for people to read and spread proper history books like The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America's Secret Government or The CIA as Organized Crime not only to help them understand Pynchon's work better, but also actually do their bit in doing something about the bad stuff going on in the world.

After all that term "conspiracy theory" was heavily promoted by the CIA to begin with, it's the definition of a weaponised term, and I think the more we can get away from phrases like that the better (not saying we should accept ridiculous lizard people stuff or anything of course).

Along with the Byron the Bulb stuff in GR, there's some little bit in Bleeding Edge about "secret anarchist code messages" and later on, the Global Consciousness Project. And I think people are generally becoming more conscious of all this hidden history. Though perhaps this is just a way for me to rationalise spending so much time reading him, by convincing myself that it's politically useful.

I've rambled as well. Here are the rest of the letters in that set, since you liked that one. It was a collection someone posted on 4chan a while ago as I recall.

https://imgur.com/r/ThomasPynchon/P1Cwr

Have you checked out "A Gravity's Rainbow Companion" by Steven Weisenburger? The book does a great job of providing line-by-line references of the many obscurities of the book. If you are interested in the Qabalistic elements of GR something like Aleister Crowley's Liber 777 might be helpful.

In Orphic Bling: Pynchon and Rilke from Wicklit blogspot, translations from both Mitchell and Leishman & Spender were cited.
On Quora, Michael Masiello whom I follow suggested Edward Snow.
An excerpt from archetypographia reads as such: “While Mitchell tends to avoid God, Gass revels in spirituality, Leishman and Spender write a more dry, academic version, Barrows and Macy play with the imagery and delicate language."
On Amazon, experienced user M. Myshack seemed to lean on MacIntyre’s “plainer, more resonate language,” and he thought Snow’s adaptation is more mundane than the poetic Mitchell.


As for me I couldn't recall much, but Mitchell seems reasonable enough. It has been my principle to prioritize poetic over literal ever since I picked up Beckett's translation of Rimbaud's "drunken boat." Anyway, good luck with your picking~

I urge any readers and lovers of Against the Day to check out the documentary King Leopold's Ghost.

One of my absolute favorite parts about immersing myself in Pynchon is going through historical stuff and finding so much of what he was drawing from and how he was talking around it, connecting it to symbols and metaphors. I just finished this one and there are innumerable connections hidden beneath the surface of the book that can be found in this section of Belgian and Congonese history. Just a luscious period of colonialism that so clearly influenced his work. My next target is some good stuff to amp up my knowledge on Victoria.

I know he wrote it on engineering graph paper and was supposedly working on it in the late sixties and early seventies. Tons of Academic papers and books have information on his sources, but probably the easiest and most accessible for this type of information is The Gravity's Rainbow Companion https://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Companion-Contexts-Pynchons/dp/0820328073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519580469&sr=8-1&keywords=gravity%27s+rainbow+companion

Enjoy the read!

Yep that's perfectly normal, just go with the flow and at some point it will start making (some) sense. The first part is a bit rough, it gets easier to follow (and more entertaining) from the second part on. Though honestly most things only clicked for me on the second read-through.

People often recommend the companion guide, and you can also use the page annotations on the Pynchon wiki. Haven't used either of them yet, but I'm due for another re-read anyway so I think next time I'll get the companion.

It's not a scholarly article, but Steven Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion is definitely something you'd want by your side.

I read Longitude while reading M&D. A fantastic book that provided a lot of background...

"Harper Perennial Modern Classics", 2005.
Looks like it's this:
https://www.amazon.com/V-Perennial-Classics-Thomas-Pynchon/dp/0060930217/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=thomas+pynchon+v&qid=1568943223&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Check out Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess. Read the the first two chapters (the first one is so you can get a sense of what his book is doing in terms of creating the "Systext," and the second chapter is specifically about GR). I would scope your library options for a copy since it's a little pricey on Amazon's marketplace.

Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History by David Cowart

It was published in 2011 so I dunno how "standard" it is but I got a lot out of it.

A Companion to The Crying of Lot 49 is helpful if you want to examine the book more closely.