On not a whole lot

David Ruiz

16 Apr 2025 — 1 min read

I didn't read shit this week.

...Okay, that's not 100% true, but what I did read has already been covered, and the world really, really doesn't need another "Gravity's Rainbow" blog because, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are already many out there—entire Substacks devoted to reading and responding to and understanding Pynchon's work. I've read several in the past month and a couple are now loaded up on my phone for quick reference on particularly difficult chapters.

This is, yes, a dagger to this newsletter's heart. The entire purpose here is to stop looking at my screen and yet here I am reading a book that sometimes necessitates a screen. I'll allow it not for any specialized exemption on "quality," but because I don't speak fucking German and there's a lot of goddamn German in this book. If that sounds annoying and lightly pretentious (of Pynchon), it is, but I've also never read any other book that so plainly loathes war in the way war deserves, so, for the next month, consider me hot-hot-hot on a most disturbing Duolingo streak (Can you escape Der Kinderofen?)

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On Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose"

On Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein"

On Ben Shattuck's "The History of Sound"

On Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness"