Gravity's Rainbow is a 1973 novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military.
Can you put in words what makes you choose it as a book to re-read yearly?
Being able to say you’ve read this book pays dividends that go far beyond just the experience of reading the contents. It will give you instant credibility among important and highly intellectual individuals, and could lead to great job offers or securing strong investments. The prestige and recognition you carry amongst peers is priceless. Even just owning the book without reading it already puts you a step ahead of other people. The right people can be blown away just seeing it on your shelf. Read the book, yearly.
That's nice to know. I read it when I was 18/19 while travelling on the New York City subway from Far Rockaway into Manhattan. Twice a day for 3 months and sometimes outside it. I still know the opening line "A screaming comes across the sky". Difficult book.
Not OP but here's why I think it's a great choice: it's the kind of book you could read many times and still not understand every nuance. There's a joke in the literary world that nobody has ever read it in full. It's monstrously complex and I'm convinced intentionally confusing at points. But it's also beautifully written, and in a way that quietly appeals to technical people.
To give you an example of the type of metaphor you'll come across: a character navigates a pair of S-shaped train tracks in a V2 rocket bunker, which the author compares to both the SS double-lightning bolt and a double-integral. He later links that to the rockets' accelerometer-based integration over the force function to compute distance traveled, and ultimately trigger "brenschluss" (fuel cutoff). Here's a famous excerpt:
That is one meaning of the shape of the tunnels down here in the Mittelwerke. Another may be the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree, or Death. The double integral stood in Etzel Ölsch’s subconscious for the method of finding hidden centers, inertias unknown, as if monoliths had been left for him in the twilight, left behind by some corrupted idea of “Civilization,” in which eagles cast in concrete stand ten meters high at the corners of the stadiums where the people, a corrupted idea of “the People” are gathering, in which birds do not fly, in which imaginary centers far down inside the solid fatality of stone are thought of not as “heart,” “plexus,” “consciousness,” (the voice speaking here grows more ironic, closer to tears which are not all theatre, as the list goes on . . .) “Sanctuary,” “dream of motion,” “cyst of the eternal present,” or “Gravity’s gray eminence among the councils of the living stone.” No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss Point? Don’t jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There’s only one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and another. There’s a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it.
