Congress Book Club: Gravity’s Rainbow Edition

The “impenetrable book” book club that is actually super fun.

In January of 2026, Congress Coffee launched a reading group of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. We read this sprawling 1079 page book over 13 weeks, and hosted weekly meetings to talk about it. What we learned was that getting together with others to talk deeply about books and reading feels really good!

After we wrapped Infinte Jest, the group didn’t want to stop. So we chose Moby-Dick as our next book to read. That was an incredible 10-week experience, finishing with a great Zoom call with Matt Kish, who has done an illustration for every page of Moby-Dick. And now, we have chosen from among many incredible books suggested by the group to take on this “funny, disturbing, exhausting and massive novel” – Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

14 Weeks. One Big Book.

Join the crew of the Congress Book Club on a 14-week discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow. We’ve kept the reading schedule to about 50 pages per week (except the last two weeks for our final push!) so that we can also keep reading the other stack of books most of us keep on-going.

“Gravity’s Rainbow  is longer, darker and more difficult than his first two books; in fact it is the longest, most difficult and most ambitious novel to appear here since Nabokov’s “Ada” four years ago; its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and Faulkner.”
– Richard Locke, The New York Times, March 11, 1973.

“And now Gravity’s Rainbow, which is V. squared and 49 cubed. It is a funny, disturbing, exhausting and massive novel, mind-fogging in its range and permutations, its display of knowledge and virtuosity — a metaphysical, phenomenological, technological Mad Comic.”
– R. Z. Sheppard, Time Magazine, March 5, 1973.