Hmm. I suppose I should not reward myself too easily for the ones I've finished (Ulysses, Moby Dick, Quixote, 1/3 credit for Inferno without the rest of the Divine C.), as they were all in the context of either H.S. or college assignments. I can say with some confidence I'd have made it through the books about whale/windmill assault, once started, on my own steam, but not the ones about the descent into dublin/hell. Have made it 50-100 pages into Gravity's Rainbow on more than one occasion, and am one of those annoying "this is my 30-gazillionth complete reading of IJ" people. All that said, I have to say that Gravity's rainbow, maybe Moby Dick a little, and the small parts of the Rabelais that I've read are the only books on that list that I get any strong sense of experiential kinship relating them to I.J. Even Ulysses, which has all the thematic Father/Son/Odysseus/Hamlet connection to IJ, feels like it belongs to a totally other world of reading experiences to me. As a result, reading IJ doesn't really directly make me feel a strong desire to (re) read any of these "enyclopedic" works, with the possible exception of the Pynchon. I guess I'll have to go wikipedia-search that critic so I understand what he is getting at by "encyclopedic" that wouldn't also apply to, basically, any of the other noted "epics" of western lit (I read the Cervantes, Joyce, and Dante all as part of one of those ever so traditional frosh college "The Epic Novel" surveys, for example.)
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