Why AtD? Why now? Why blog?

For the two years since I finished reading Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's earlier long and difficult novel, I've been floating in a sea of accessible fiction and series mysteries, mostly bought used. And while there's nothing wrong with choosing your reading material based on what someone liked enough to trade for store credit, I'm beginning to feel the need for more structure, more meat. More direction. More reward. I miss images like Grigori the octopus oozing sullenly in the corner, cows drunk on fermented sileage uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them, a pit band tootling and blatting at one another. I miss throwaway lines about Beethoven just making you want to invade Poland. I miss bad puns and filk that I can't quite place to its source. Most of all I miss great writing.

On the other hand, Against the Day runs 1085 pages and is too big to fit in any handbag I own. It's a commitment not just in time and attention, but also to carrying a totebag so that I'll be able to read on the subway. And I'm still traumatized by having taken notes to try to get a handle on Gravity's Rainbow.

I'd like to finish Against the Day before Pynchon's new work, Inherent Vice, is released August 4th. I'm enough of a fangirl to want the experience of reading the new release when it's actually new--not when there's already a consensus opinion about it among other nonprofessional readers, not when it comes out in paperback, not when it's canonized in a course somewhere. And I'd like to have finished the previous work before starting the new one. (Yes, I most certainly do understand how dorky this sounds.)

As for the blog, I need the discipline. Two months to read over a thousand pages--over a thousand pages that are fun and funny but not easy or fast--that's a lot of discipline. Here goes.