I've read only the first three: V, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. I own all the rest until this month, however, and they're on the bucket list. The first three novels are all justly legendary, all justly frustrating. Lot 49, which Pynchon is today inclined to disparage, remains his best entry-level novel. V is dazzling, if exasperating (I threw the paperback across the room in frustration about 125 pages in; retrieved it from a different room five years later and completed it in about three sittings). Gravity's Rainbow is a hallucinatory masterpiece, and a hypnotic reading experience. I read all of these before I turned thirty. All, and their successor works, will merit a reading before I peg out. Pynchon and Ashton are contemporaries. Coincidence?
cordially,