Citations Levine announced to the world that he was cancelling all his classes to lock himself away for three months in 1973 to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Eight hours a day. No remission. He emerged, as he put it, “giddy” but convinced that “Thomas Pynchon is the most important American novelist now writing”. Of course not everyone is in a position to make that kind of investment in difficult fiction. “My top 10 unfinishable novels” at www.theguardian.com