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ANAXA-XXVII t1_j6dud2z wrote

Not really while reading a book, but playing through the twist ending of MGS2 for the first time as a kid left me with a sense of disorientation afterwards. I felt like someone had just turned everything upside down because out of nowhere the familiar gaming experience had radically transformed from the familiar to the surreal. Whatever I thought the medium (games, books, etc.) was capable of, apparently there's more to it than I could have ever imagined at the time. It was an experience so unique because it was so hard for me to fathom personally, but it's also an experience shared by other people too. Gravity's Rainbow was a complete reimagining of what I thought a story in literature could live up to. Reading can sometimes feel like a private sharing of knowledge because it's a solitary activity and oftentimes the people you know in real life haven't read the book, so it can feel like you possess your own inside knowledge about something, but Gravity's Rainbow is so discombobulating that the experience is almost wholly unique for each reader. You can get 4 people together to discuss the book, and come away with 4 different perspectives from having read it. It's both disorienting for the individual, but also disorienting for everyone who's read it, and the result is that everyone comes away with their own private interaction with Pynchon, having only seen their own sliver of it, and all the individual perspectives never entirely adding up to anything conclusive. It's a rare genius to have written something that remains so personal for the reader, and yet so elusive for those who have read it.

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RVG990104 OP t1_j6eb9vv wrote

MGS2 is an amazing game. Anyways, I'm starting to see why so many people love this book, it really is incredible.

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