The Gravity's Rainbow Handbook: A Key to the Thomas Pynchon Novel

I've read Gravity's Rainbow several times, and have read selected pages and passages in the book many, many times. It's the greatest novel I've ever encountered, an absolutely amazing book that rewards multiple readings and inspires research and analysis. The more I think and learn about the book, the more amazed I am at Pynchon's achievement, which seems to me at least to be almost ultra-human. How can any one person master the encyclopedic range of topics and technologies in GR, and integrate them all so seamlessly into such a beautifully and masterfully written book?Which I hope provides some context for Robert Crayola's Gravity's Rainbow Handbook. Crayola has managed to summarize the narrative (not an easy task), provide historical background for the story, and catalog a good number of the main characters (and there are hundreds of characters name-checked in GR), all in a concise format that's a joy to read. Crayola's handbook added both to my knowledge of, and appreciation for, the book. Well worth the ebook price!Mr. Crayola, I hope you're working on another handbook. May I suggest Against the Day, which might be Pynchon's second greatest novel (it's certainly the longest), and one I don't think gets the attention and praise it deserves.

There isn't much insight at all in any of this. The character descriptions are pretty short and I guess they give you the basis of the characters, but there is a lot missing. Some of the section summaries miss very big details and at times suggest that things happen that didn't actually happen, as they are fantasies or dreams. It useful if you want to read a section a week and read a summary to backtrack and find out where you left off, but there is soooo much to this book with so many details to be explored that it is just the barest of bare bones on what happens in this book.

Though the author suggests reading this prior to GR. I read it after. I think GR is one of those books that you go into knowing you will have to read it again, so I just plowed through it and picked up what I could and formed my own general perspective on the novel. Then I read this and the authors insights for a few aha moments and just an overall summary of the book.

Coming in handy.

Expected a bit more from the work.

Great product. Fast shipping, nice service.

I read this along with "Gravity's Rainbow". I very much like teh author's enthusiasm for teh novel. The brief synopses of the sections I found useful for finding sections that I wished to re-read. The character list was useful at times when characters reappeared after hundreds of pages. This is a very useful book that I would recommend to anyone reading the novel and would be especially useful to students reading the novel for course work. I would recommend it.

I am currently reading Gravity's Rainbow for the second time. Initially, a few years ago I found it quite a chore but thoroughly rewarding. After being haunted by aspects of the book I thought I would have another crack at Pynchon. I read The Crying Of Lot 49 to make sure It wasn't a case of PTSD, and after thoroughly enjoying it I went back to read V. Now I'm back at the starting point trying to get more insight into GR.I'm rather disappointed by this handbook. It mentions some key concepts, summarises the main characters, and has an overview of what happens in each section. I was hoping for more thorough analysis of the themes and breakdown of the more interesting uses of language throughout the book. I would no doubt have found this useful on my initial reading - the glossary of characters alone would have helped.I think the most disappointing section is the glossary of terms. It mentions SOE but does NOT even cover the military acronyms of the time (beyond the core fictional ones).This utterly fails as a source of deeper insight into the novel. It is a small missing glossary to the novel with a plot overview. If you are getting lost in the novel this may be of some use to you, otherwise I would skip it.

The book is written in a simple and clear way, and considering that it is about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, it wasn't an easy task to achieve. By the way, there are some mistakes in the little sections resumes (for example, the part about Pokler and Ilsa and their "affair", that it wasn't real - as Crayola says - but it was just a dream or a thought), even though most of the times they are helpful, especially if you "missed"something while reading... Maybe some deeper and more specific essays and comments would have been useful. In the end, since it is short and quite clear, can be a nice guide to read while exploring GR.

Found the guide useful help in coming to terms with the book but after sixty pages of the actual book I asked myself why am Ireading it?Just because something like gravity's rainbow is complex and full of obscure references and literary asides doesn't mean it's great or even good.For me G R is one of those books that needs to be put on the shelf and left there for a rainy day. Somewhere over the rainbow.