Gravity's Rainbow

By: Thomas Pynchon

Narrated by: George Guidall

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Fixed!

I'd just like to point out that as of currently (Dec 2017) the audiobook has been fixed, and the repeated sections have been edited out.

If any readers were holding out because of what other reviews have mentioned, you no longer need to worry, as the audiobook has been properly re-edited.

This is a hard book to listen to it

George Guidall does a great job of narrating this complicated novel, but I found it challenging to follow the plot of the novel. If you want to really understand this book I think reading it visually is a better strategy. However, I still enjoyed the book and accepted that I would be confused a lot. It's a strange, compelling, and frequently disturbing story, and Pynchon does not tie up a lot of the threads he introduces. I found that it gets much more engaging after the war ends and the story becomes much more colorful.

Psychedelic Romp

It would take an entire book to accurately describe what this book is about. As one reviewer put it, "every sentence is a research project."

I found it nearly impossible to figure out wtf was going on most of the time without a guide; even then, you can't have a guide for every sentence.

I gave it 5 stars because it is a brilliant work of art, but that certainly doesn't mean it will appeal to everyone - many will hate it or simply give up on it.

Despite the inherent difficulties of narrating this beast of a book, I didn't care for the staccato style presentation. The chapter breaks seemed random.

Interesting and dark Cold War novel.

Sort of a mash-up of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, with maybe some Lolita thrown in.
For those who didn’t live through the era, it says a lot about how the tension and ecstasy of victory in WWII turned almost instantly into the Cold War, with a killer that would get you without warning.

Beyond the 5 Star

Good lord. If you want a difficult, thought provoking, funny, relevant and timeless story- pleeeease pick up a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow. Take notes, talk about it with friends. What a ride