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Shadow Ticket

Thomas Pynchon's probable last novel drops October 7th, he's 88 for goodness sakes, and I've been trying to force myself to finish Gravity's Rainbow. I'm in the 500's of a 760 page novel for the longest times as I join 3 books clubs, and don't really follow through with most of the book. It's October now and there's not much time before the book comes out. 

I'm on page 505 on October 1st and I've got to read 43 pages a day, which sounds easy, but not with Pynchon when you're looking up everything. I've posted a lot about looking things up, but I can't do that down the home stretch. I can't write about what an ax bell is, a new discovery of something in the world I didn't know existed. That's what I like about Pynchon, he's always teaching me things. I will update this post as I get the book and read it. 

There are just too many amazing quotations (p. 509 GR):


"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar "∆t" considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago, or even—as Slothrop now-what you're doing here, at the base of this colossal curved embankment. ...

And vocabulary:

Preterition: the action of passing over or disregarding a matter, especially the rhetorical technique of mentioning something by professing to omit it:
"the favourite rhetorical trope of the historical novelists is preterition, saying that you are not going to say something and thereby saying it"




Review Links for Shadow Ticket that I'll read after I read it and form my own opinions first: 

Washington Post

Telegraph

Times

New Yorker

Book Marks: Collects reviews, I have the same 4 when I look at it. 

NY Book Review

Guardian

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