It's Monday! What are you Reading?

Happy Civic holiday fellow Canadians! It's not a statutory holiday but I'm celebrating it as one because I finally get a day off, which means, it's time to catch up on some reading. Thanks again Sheila from Book Journey for hosting this weekly meme. 

Last week I finished Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky but have been too intimidated to write a review for it yet. It's a huge multifaceted novel and it is difficult not to write something about it and come across as redundant. 

Right now I am slowly making my way through Thomas Pynchon's V.  

Yikes, this is proving to be one of the most challenging reads in recently memory. Not only is it disorienting stylistically, but it is also downright baffling at times. There are times when I seem to grasp what is going on but then the wacky narrative shifts to more abstruseness or Pynchon loses me with historical references, cryptic passages, the multitude of characters or jarring points of reference. Despite my endless frustrations, there is something strangely alluring about Pynchon's esoteric writing. He's obviously a very smart man with an expansive vocabulary and an encyclopedic mind but it can be very overwhelming at times. As his first novel, I fear that it might turn out to be an exercise in style; a young author attempting to push the boundaries of post-modernism. I find that the novel is more enjoyable if I stop wracking my brain over all of the incomprehensible details and just let the prose wash over me. Oddly enough, the more I read, the more it begins to makes sense. Sorta. I am still uncertain whether he can sustain a 600 page novel and I constantly waver between abandoning it or continuing on to the end. Hmmmm...

Has anyone else read this (or anything else by Pynchon for that matter) and can provide me with reassurance that it is worth the effort?