Anyway, I finally finished it.
The following review provides a more telling summation than I ever could. Here are some highlights:
- You will get fit reading it. If you're the kind of person who is even contemplating reading this book, chances are that sport was not your best subject at school. A couple of weeks of holding this breezeblock while continually scratching your head and stroking your chin will leave you with arms like a stevedore's.
- It will provide endless amusement as you try to relate to friends and family just what has happened in the last fifty pages that you've read. "Well, there was this toilet ship... No, a ship full of toilets... I'm not sure, I think it was a battleship... No, it was manned by a cadre of Nazi herero rocket technicians.... I'm not making this up, you know. I couldn't."
- It will make the real world seem explicable and simple. The confusing currents of modern politics, socio-sexual relationships and inter-office internecine warfare will feel like a refuge, in which people do not speak in baffling riddles constructed from references to things you've barely heard of; in which you have a reasonable grasp on when someone is telling you certifiable historical fact and when they're just stringing you along with a very long shaggy dog story; and in which effect still has the good manners to open the door for cause and say to it, "after you."
- You will get stuff done around the house. That fence panel that needs fixing, that leak in the roof, that room you've been meaning to tidy; once Gravity's Rainbow makes your leisure time harder work than your chores, your normal prevarication routines will be completely turned on their head. Friends and family will wonder how your scruffy dusty book filled slum has been transformed into a gleaming futurist show home, and you'll be able to recommend them some reading material that does the job better than any bottle of Mr Muscle.