On the other hand I recently gave Gravity's Rainbow a go right after slogging through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and just couldn't do it. The premise seems interesting/odd enough, but I found the writing impossible to follow. I'm sure listening to it as an audiobook didn't help, but this was the first book I gave up on after 15 years of audiobooks. At some point I just thought to myself, why am I subjecting myself to something I neither comprehend nor enjoy...

I really like Pynchon style however. I think he perfectly nails the mix of serious and zany. Vineland is a good example. On the one hand, it’s a fairly serious book about the end of the counterculture and what the election of Nixon meant for the American dream but on the other hand it’s also a book in which a community of living-dead has its own radio station, one hundred pages in the middle of it concerns a woman training to be a lethal ninja and perfecting a delayed assassination technique and Godzilla makes a cameo and despite all of that the whole things feel coherent and properly jointed. I also really enjoy the rhythm of Pynchon sentences. I can definitely see why it wouldn’t work as an audiobook however. It’s writing you definitely have to read at your own pace.

Interestingly enough, I devoured Infinite Jest and loved the entire novel. Gravity's Rainbow was simply too confusing to me and I think I would have done better had I used a reading guide to support me through the novel.

A similar website exists for Infinite Jest: https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...

I think it is almost impossible to read Gravity's Rainbow exactly once. Either you give up halfway through it, or you finish it and re-read it. It makes more sense, I think, when re-reading it.