I think Gravity's Rainbow is vastly underrated.

I recently finished this novel and honestly, it's reputation as this incredibly difficult book belies the reality of it. Granted, it was not an easy read, but not nearly as hard as it's made out to be. And it instantly jumps into the mix of my favorit novels ever.

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Originally Posted by metal134

I recently finished this novel and honestly, it's reputation as this incredibly difficult book belies the reality of it. Granted, it was not an easy read, but not nearly as hard as it's made out to be. And it instantly jumps into the mix of my favorit novels ever.

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Pynchon, to me, has a very flight-of-consciousness style that I think confuses a lot of readers, especially that that genre of writing seemed relatively outdated, having nearly gone to the graves with Woolf and Joyce.
The vagueness of the subjects he wrote of also perplexed me a bit; I would read part after part, and the scene he wrote of would get revealed late in the chapter, so I would have to back-track as to what on earth he said of this and that.
Surely, I have read more difficult things, as you well said, like almost anything by Joyce, but it seemed one of the more mysterious things I have read, definitely worth another read sometime in the future, if I feel brave again. :D

I've only read one of his novels: V. I know he writes in a non linear style that he supposedly got from Nobakov. I didn't think V. was particularly hard to read, so I'll have to look into Gravity. By the way, I liked V.