Slow Learner: Early Stories

This collection is good for completists but I could have lived with just “Entropy” and “The Secret Integration” (but I did love “Entropy”). Also pretty sure “Under The Rose” is almost entirely contained in “V”.

An infuriating book in some ways.
A collection of early, mostly not-so-good short stories, as Pynchon makes clear in his Introduction.
A Small Rain just kind of lies there. I found it hard to give a damn about the characters.
Low-lands is really a kind of fantasy: sort of like a Behind-the-Looking-Glass view of a favorite Leonard Cohen song.
I just didn't get Entropy.
As Pynchon mentions in his Introduction, Under the Rose was lifted largely from an 1899 Baedeker's guide to Egypt for a writing seminar he was taking at Cornell. It reads like an Baedeker-obfuscated parody of John Buchan, who Pynchon also mentions in his Introduction. Anyway, it inspired me to start The Thirty-Nine Steps, which is infinitely better written, better paced, clearer, and engrossing.
But, finally, at the end, The Secret Integration was a sort of gem, a redeeming feature of this book for me. A surprise ending in more ways than one.