And at the quarter, it's Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks 1, and William T. Vollmann OMG WTF?!?

Warning: scattershot reactions ahead.

So I'm around about a quarter of the way through Europe Central, depending on whether or not you count the end notes. (I, generally, haven't, though in some cases, I have.) My reaction so far can be summed up by the words "annoying" and "brilliant", in varying ratios, depending on the page, paragraph, hell, the sentence I'm reading at the time. It's like, I know that 20th Century military/cultural history is difficult, complex stuff, but at times, I wonder if Mr. Vollmann isn't going out of his way to make things more difficult than they need to be. (His weird rhetorical verbal ticks often just annoy the hell out of me; compare to DFW's "like"s which are mostly just fun. When WTV's narrator(s?) repeatedly says, "you know," I mostly want to grab him [them?] by the throat and say, "No, I don't! Why do you think I'm reading this book! It's your job to make me know!") And then at other times I'm wrapping the gold book in a lemon slice and bashing my brains out with it, when he drops a line or two of seriously Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster levels of genius. So yeah, I dunno.

It's just a big damn difficult muscle-car of a book which is sometimes really rewarding and sometimes just really difficult and I guess there's no way around it.

Maybe it's weird, but I do like the longer chapters better; I think he does better when he tells an actual story and has real narrative flow upon which to drape his observations and ideas and thoughts and whatever. Admit it: you secretly adore shorter chapters in novels, because it makes the book feel snappier and sometimes less like "work". But in Vollmann's case, the shorter (couple page) chapters have kind of made me roll my eyes in advance, because, chances are, if there's going to be places he loses me, it's going to be those chapters. (Like, if DFW tried to write Infinite Jest as a piece of flash fiction...although maybe that's a bad example because DFW's longer chapters in IJ often epitomized the idea of "literature as work", so take that as you will.)

Mostly as ever I feel my shortcomings as a reader; here's a lot of data and info and story and what not and I'm sometimes just not processing it right, I worry. It's a book I'm already wondering if it wouldn't be better digested when re-read. Not that I really intend on re-reading it right away--I've got a lot of other damn large books I'd like to read this year.

Lest this reaction seem too negative: the 80 page chapter "The Palm Tree of Deborah," which I just read yesterday, was pretty much completely ecstatic and lemon-slice-wrapped-gold-brick painful. (Also the longest chapter so far, and looks like second longest in the book, and knowing what I think I know about the way this book is going, I really can't wait for the longest chapter, which is way the hell out there near the end of the book; fab.)