Our first “Big-Book” Group Reading - “Against the Day,” by Thomas Pynchon

The big book approacheth! If you weren’t able to figure out my little graphical hint in last week’s post, the first big book we’re going to read as a group on “The Puget News” is Thomas Pynchon’s new 1,120 page monster, “Against the Day”. It’s being released a week from today and has a great pre-order price of $21.00 (list price of $35.00) at Amazon.com (just click the image above to place your order. Something resemblng a phone book will show up on your doorstep soon thereafter).

A couple of you are signed up to read this with me already, but here is the tentative plan. We will get the books here no later than 23rd and take roughly a month to read it through. The goal is to finish by Christmas and then to go out and celebrate when everyone is back in Seattle from Christmas break. Everyone, feel free to join us! This is not a book to read alone - I promise.

As we read along, I’ll be posting ongoing updates. Feel free to let me know if you’re interested in joining us and/or producing written related pieces for “The Puget News.” I am actively trying to search for good contributions and contributors (let me know if you want to write about art/music/theatre/literature and we’ll talk).

To get you fired up, here is Thomas Pynchon’s own description of “Against the Day” at Amazon.com:

Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck.

–Thomas Pynchon