A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO THOMAS PYNCHON

The author's famously dense novels can feel intimidating. That's what makes them perfect for reading in groups.

- BY DAVID KIPEN

Whatever book club you're in, Thomas Pynchon has you covered. Many of us consider him the best American writer since F. Scott Fitzgerald. Turns out that Pynchon's perennially Nobel-touted shelf offers a book for each book club category featured in this year's L.A. Times Festival of Books issue, from politics to romance.

Maybe you've heard Pynchon's notoriously hard-to-summarize work called "difficult." But it's just this supposed difficulty that should ideally qualify him for all but the most timid of book clubs. Like barn raisings or pub quizzes, Pynchon may be best tackled among friends, with each contributor volunteering their insights and interpretations to inspire the rest.

So, in keeping with Ranganathan's third law of library science — “Every book its reader” — here's a book of Pynchon's for every book club:

Travel

Hyperventilatingly funny, emetically horrifying, aphrodisiacally romantic, "Gravity's Rainbow" follows its antihero, Tyrone Slothrop, all over Europe in the waning days of World War II. It's a travel book like "Finnegans Wake" is a bedtime story, but that won't stop me from visiting as many of its locales as possible on my way to the International Pynchon Week conference in June.

Memoir

The short-story collection "Slow Learner" contains not only the ideal place to start reading Pynchon's fiction — that's "The Secret Integration" — but also his charmingly self-deprecating introduction, which conveys more sanity and self-knowledge than any 12 book-length memoirs you can name.

Long reads

At 1,085 pages (in my copy), "Against the Day" is Pynchon's longest book and his most underappreciated. The joy of discovery hovers over every page. Most of what you see in it or say about it has never been seen or said before.