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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle
@colewehrle.bsky.social
5.7K followers 260 following 550 posts
Game designer focusing on strategy games with strong emergent narratives. Half of Wehrlegig Games. Creative director at Leder Games. Voracious reader of just about anything I can get my hands on.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 29d
Today we're announcing a small change in plans on our fall schedule. I'm still busy with the second edition of An Infamous Traffic and Hell Raisers is making great progress, but higher demand than anticipated and the vagaries of Trump's stupid trade policies means we need to get reprinting!
wehrlegig.games
Wehrlegig Games @wehrlegig.games · 29d
🚨 The John Company & Molly House Reprint Kickstarter campaign launches October 21st, 2025. www.kickstarter.com/projects/124... /🧵
Two close-up lifestyle photos, one of a John Company tower and metal flag and the other of the Molly House movement dice.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
At least, those are the sorts of things that have brought me back to the book a few times. It's certainly never a favorite, but along with Vineland, I think Bleeding Edge has steadily crept up in my estimation each time I've read it.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
I think that her perspective forces Pynchon a little out of his narrative comfort zone too. He can't just fill the book with smoke and mirrors or have a character like Doc pull us along with his doper esp. That gives everything a whole lot of control (outside of the cyberspace).
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
I do think Maxine is an amazing development of some of his earlier characters. She's the rare, competent Pynchon hero that is both out of and within in their proper place. In some ways she reminds me of Mason.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
I didn't find the stylization of Bleeding Edge any more intrusive than his earlier work. Many of the scenes could have been ripped from his earlier books. But certainly it has a lot more conversation and the scope is far narrower. I think that suits the plumbing of cyberspace and seedy capital.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
It's a funny thing, being this deep in an author's work. I find that I'm so interested in what Pynchon might think is interesting, that I'm happy to go on a ride anytime. Even the Dylan albums from the 80s have their merits.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
I'm only partially through Shadow Ticket, and don't feel strong enough about it one way or another, though I am charmed by it (perhaps my own Midwestern bias). What didn't you like about Bleeding Edge? I've done it a few times and it's really grown on me.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
I think that's true but the centering of the family is really pronounced in Vineland in ways that don't really map to IV. I used to think about IV as a kind of prequel to Vineland but it doesn't fully work with that lens either.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
I'd suggest trying out Gravity's Rainbow. The book is divided into four sections. Read the first section (150 pages or so) and see what you think. Think about it like a shorter novel and don't worry about the back 3/4ths.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 1d
Having stomached Finnegan's Wake, I'm happy to report that GR is nothing like it. It's a propulsive thriller. There are sections that are difficult (for lots of reasons), but the prose is at the service of the story and the characters and it very much works like a novel.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
I don't think there's a single best entry point. They are all great novels and deserving of your attention. But, for a first and only read, I'd say you should be guided mostly by your own interests and taste. Do you like 18th/19thC novels? Do M&D. Stoner Noir? Inherent Vice. WW2? Gravity's Rainbow.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
And here's the second part!
bsky.app/profile/cole...
colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
Alright, the littlest kiddo has been dropped off at school. Now I can get back to the work at hand. Let's get into the later works.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
Guides to Shakespeare get a little longer with each century of lost context. Dicken's London is receding from view. Joyce's Dublin of 1904 almost feels like another planet. It is such a gift to share a bit of time and history with a writer of Pynchon's skill and ambition.

Now, everybody—

/end
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
These are books that are begging to be read and enjoyed. Though they are erudite, there's no generation of readers who is better positioned to enjoy these novels then your own.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
These are big serious questions and there's a lot to gain from thinking through them. BUT, for all of that, the books are so much fun. They are filled with songs and jokes and amazing characters. No one can write a chase scene like Pynchon or sucker punch you with an unexpected turn.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
And, with Bleeding Edge you get something like the frenzied coda to this body of work. A world, quite literarily, being remade (digitally) and crashing down at the same time. It can be a bracing read in this day and age.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
Inherent Vice offers a far more intimate portrait. It centers the individual, asking how it might be possible to navigate (or fail to navigate) the challenges our moment presents. What are the lines of connection that might be possible?
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
In Against the Day expands these questions and adds another dimension, time. Whereas M&D is really just about one period (we don't follow the drama's of Mason's children), AtD looks at how the present is composed of layers of experience. Grudges are held and let go of. A distant light fades.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
In Mason and Dixon, it's the projection of force/law/ideas across space. What does it mean to dictate or survey a line? How does what we know about the stars inform our sense of our own station and trajectory? Can we map ourselves? Can everything be known?
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
With Mason and Dixon and Against the Day, I think you see him at the height of his powers. Those are books obsessed with the period of their making (Washington, like Clinton, doesn't inhale), BUT they are clearly interested in some big questions too.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
So Gravity's Rainbow is about the Nixon Years. Vineland is very much about Reagan and neo-liberal politics. I think he might actually get too bound up in the present in those books.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
In GR we have the seeds of the rest of his work. There's a more human focus and a deep interest in revolutionary politics as well as long histories that inform a moment. It's also essentially a historical novel. But it's not a historical novel animated by nostalgia. He's writing about the present.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
Okay, time for a few final thoughts. I think Pynchon's work can be divided into two sections. First, you have V., Crying of Lot, and Gravity's Rainbow. In this period, you could say that he invented the post modern novel (V), made fun of it (Lot 49) and then invented it again (GR).
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
And, tomorrow, we get Shadow Ticket. I've got a bunch to say about it, but I want to wait a few weeks before I get into the weeds.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
And it's gorgeous to boot! I mean, come on!
Sometimes, down on the subway, a train Maxine's riding on will slowly be overtaken by a local or an express on the other track, and in the darkness of the tunnel, as the windows of the other train move slowly past, the lighted panels appear one by one like a series of fortune-telling cards being dealt and slid in front of her. The Scholar, the Un-Housed, the Warrior Thief, the Haunted Woman. After a while Maxine has come to understand that all the faces framed in these panels are precisely those out of all the city's millions she must in the hour be paying most attention to, in particular those whose eyes actually meet her own-they are the day's messengers from whatever The Beyond has for a third world, where the days are assembled one by one under non-union conditions. Each messenger carrying the props required for their character, shopping bags, books, musical instruments, arrived here out of darkness, bound again into darkness, with only a minute to deliver the intelligence Maxine needs. At some point naturally she begins to wonder if she might not be performing the same role for some face looking back out another window at her.
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colewehrle.bsky.social
Cole Wehrle @colewehrle.bsky.social · 2d
Come for the meditations on the early internet, the first big dot-com bubble, and 90s culture, but stay for Maxine and Horst's amazingly drawn relationship, the picture of New York at the turn of the century, and a jaw dropping depiction of September 11th.
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