Rocketman's Above All that Shit, Emil

Every year, I set a personal reading goal for myself, to encourage myself to keep reading and finding new novels and authors to enjoy. Because reading is good. For the last two years, my goal has been to finish 20 books in one year. There were periods in university where I would fall out of the practice of reading before bed, which is when I usually read. It was sometimes hard to stay committed to reading for pleasure when a big part of my program involved reading dense articles for classes.

While finishing my reading goal, there's also a few other goals I try to finish within my larger project. I might try to read a book from a famous author who I've never read before. Read more books by women. Read more books by people of colour. I don't just want to read more books, I want to broaden my perspective through this.

This year, I wanted to start the year off by reading a difficult book that was noted for its complexity. The one I chose was Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, because it, from what I had read about it, seemed like a book I would enjoy. It was long, it was dense, the narrative was extremely difficult to follow at times, and there were thousands of characters.

But I just finished it! It took me six goddamn months! I started this in January, when I was still commuting to EJ Pratt Library to finish my thesis, as it wasn't even close to finished. Now I've been done school for two months and have started a new job. I don't really know what else to say, so I'm just going to dump something I've been thinking about since I started Part 2 of the book.

Tyrone Slothrop's outfits ranked:

1. The Hawaiian shirt he wears while battling the octopus.
2. The Zoot Suit he wears while escaping France.
3. The "Rocketman" outfit he wears while stealing a huge supply of hash from the Potsdam Conference.
4. The Russian military uniform with the flags removed.
5. The pig costume.