That's interesting, I tried Gravity's Rainbow on audiobook and came to a conclusion that written copy would be better due to sheer amount of detail and different characters. I'm no stranger to large tomes (tackled GR right after getting through Infinite Jest audiobook), but it was the first one I gave up on about a quarter to a third in. At one point I realized that I'm really not enjoying the process and barely following the storyline. Maybe will try again in ten years.
Every few months I check out the library's audiobook copy of Gravity's Rainbow and listen to the first chapter or so while running errands, then give up. I've heard a lot of the banana breakfast :)
I read the first few chapters of the book then skimmed and read some more. Pretty grim stuff in there...
This book is my white whale. I read "V" straight to the end in a few sittings and love it and think about it a lot when I'm in NYC or the eastern seaboard or Malta or Florence. I read "The Crying of Lot 49" straight through in one go and loved its paranoid charm.
But despite having lived in London and thought a lot about what it was like for people there during the war I just can't finish Gravity's Rainbow. Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.
> Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.
This is what it took for me - having a few other people agreeing to a schedule and meeting to talk about what we had read. I ultimately very much enjoyed GR but it is really difficult to read alone for the first time. Both the social pressure to keep at it and the ability to have "what the hell was that" conversations with other people really helped.
(My father's favorite author is Pynchon, so while he slightly prefers Mason & Dixon to GR, it's been in my awareness for a very long time; I think my first attempt was in my teens and I didn't succeed at finishing until my mid twenties)
I love Infinite Jest with all my heart, and I also tried to read GR shortly after as I was on a “big book” kick (had also read Underworld in the same time period and loved that too).
Gave up on GR after about 200 or so pages realizing I couldn’t ultimately describe a single thing I had read.
I really want to finish it at some point but I also want to enjoy it. Maybe at a different point in life.
It would be interesting to listen to the book where the narrator does a different voice for every character, since so often the character speaking (and also the time and location) changes somewhere in the middle of the sentence and it is up to the reader to figure out when. I bet there are a lot of different opinions as to where it happened and how much overlap there is.