I’ve been prepping myself for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Intimidation, mostly stemming from the book’s history, is running high: in 1974, it had been considered for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but eleven members of the board vetoed the decision, calling Gravity’s Rainbow “unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene.” (Sound familiar? Interestingly enough, the Pulitzer board didn’t hand out prizes in the fiction category in 1974.) My failure to get through a Pynchon novel—I’d previously attempted Mason & Dixon—doesn’t really stem from the books themselves, but rather from how they’re often described. I can deal with “turgid” and “obscene” books, but “unreadable” and “overwritten” isn’t exactly high praise. In truth, I didn’t find Mason & Dixon to be overly difficult; I was perfectly content to just let the book wash over me without trying to grasp all the details. I was actually enjoying the book—I kept telling myself that it wasn’t as bad as people said—but my fear got the better of me: instead of focusing on the book, all I could think about was how difficult Pynchon is supposed to be. So, after three chapters, I set the book aside, and not without a bit of relief.

But how does one actually go about reading Pynchon? Like James Joyce, Pynchon is mythical in stature: he’s revered for his wordplay, his originality, and the sheer “braininess” of his books. If you’re not careful, you may get carried away, hopelessly lost and infuriated. I’ve been toying with the idea of just taking the plunge, of trying to get through Gravity’s Rainbow in one weekend. It worked when I read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, I reasoned, so I didn’t see why it wouldn’t work in this case.

Now I’m not sure if tearing through Gravity’s Rainbow in one weekend would be the ideal way to go. Foucault’s Pendulum isn’t excessively difficult or convoluted; it just requires you to get through two hundred pages or so before it starts to reveal its secrets. Gravity’s Rainbow, on the other hand, seems like a completely different monster—a post-Ulysses, if you will. So I’ve been gathering reading aids in preparation for Pynchon’s opus: SparkNotes, wikis, concordances, essays, and .pdfs of notes pertaining to the book. It may turn out that all this is unnecessary—or maybe I’m just making things harder than they have to be—but considering the book’s supposed level of difficulty, it can’t hurt to be prepared. I’m heeding the lesson I learned with my aborted Ulysses attempt: reading doesn’t always guarantee understanding.