Yesterday, I finished reading the uniquely momentous and monumental Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. My thumbnail thoughts about it HERE. Dead Tooth, Sea-Maid, Young Echo and Germany’s two World Wars in palimpsest. And its accompanying lamentatory music.
I am continuing the reading of the massive ‘Against the Day’ by Thomas Pynchon. For anyone who enjoys SF like Michael Wyndham Thomas’s ‘Valiant Razalia’, Jules Verne, Dr Who, LOST, Christopher Priest and, dare I say, ‘Nemonymous Night’ – as well as much more that is uniquely Pynchon, with Wild Western Dynamiters and seekers of Iceland Spar…
The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books 
I am now coming up to about halfway in Pynchon’s AGAINST THE DAY and I know already it is his masterpiece.
I shall no doubt have more to say when I’ve finished reading it. I have just travelled alongside Pynchon and the Chums of Chance under and through the sub-desert. I can’t help but compare this novel with my own NEMONYMOUS NIGHT novel published in June 2011 by Chomu Press. Mine was first written piecemeal in 2005/6 on public blogs, while Pynchon’s novel was first published in Nov 2006. It is impossible either author read the other’s book at that time; they are vastly different novels as well as being uncannily similar. Similar, other than the fact that the Pynchon novel is far far superior, of course, to mine. But I am proud it is similar as well as so utterly different….
Also relevant: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/literature-as-innocent-gestalt/