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Mason & Dixon

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Mason & Dixon

By: Thomas Pynchon
Narrated by: Steven Crossley
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About this listen

Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic - from their first journey together to the Cape of Good Hope to pre-Revolutionary America and back, through the strange yet redemptive turns of fortune in their later lives, on a grand tour of the Enlightenment's dark hemisphere, as they observe and participate in the many opportunities for insanity presented them by the Age of Reason.

©1997 Thomas Pynchon (P)2019 Recorded Books Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction
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The book is staggeringly clever, funny, warm and sad, and the performance is truly excellent.

Absolutely incredible

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I love Pynchon but I had avoided this novel until now. More fool me. This is an epic story, full of fascinating insights into the period of scientific and imperial adventure, which at the same time is a touching homage to the title characters. Genuinely moving, wonderfully bizarre, an absolute treat and beautifully performed by the narrator.

A wonderful adventure

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I really love this book and think it's a great story and well written. But I personally find this narration really hard to follow - while his diction and accents are great, sometimes his reading has no flow or rhythm and it's like he's reading a load of short sentences which makes it hard to understand...it's annoying because when you read them the sentences in the book are actually beautifully formed and their meter and complexity add to the story. (It's hard to explain what I mean exactly!)

Great book, poor narration.

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Excellent audiobook, funny, intelligent, interesting, complicated but not overly so. The dialogue between characters is the best part imo

Stunning Dialogue and Narration

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Could not finish it. With 6 hours to go I had lost the goodwill to be impressed. And had lost the plot hours before.

Clever and well informed but self-indulgent.

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