Reading Gravity's Rainbow for the first time. Always hesitated to read it; worried that it would feel dated, a relic of the late 60s/early 70's.
My God, I was wrong. In a purely aesthetic, intellectual, philosophical sense, GR is one of the great achievements in literature. For me, we're talking Ulysses and Moby Dick level (I'm only 200 pages in, by the way).
Politically, reading Gravity's Rainbow in 2005 is to feel a sense of utter dread and portent.
The book is so incredibly dense, picking out one scene is to do an injustice. But I was utterly mesmerized by a scene set in Wiemar Germany, during a seance to summon Walter Rathenau, an assassinated jewish minister. Sprinkled throughout the seance are industrialists with swastika lapel pins, manufacturers of poison gas and rockets.
The book is a seething, paranoiac walk through history dictated by cold elites, the They who start wars for their own obscure reasons.
Have you read Gravity's Rainbow? What're your thoughts? After 1984, I think this is an utterly apt novel for the Bush years... I can't suggest it highly enough.