I've have never spent any time in Los Angeles, and I've only read one Thomas Pynchon book completely - V.
I have started The Crying of Lot 49 twice and made it through 677 pages of Mason and Dixon. I have passed through the L.A. airport three or four times.
It's a city I am certain I would love and revile in equal measure, but really, who cares about my experiences or lack thereof?
Wired magazine did this awesome map to celebrate the release of the new Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. Check out the user submitted google map at their page as well - great idea!
From what the publisher told me and from talking to friends who've read it - Inherent Vice is certainly more accessible than his last several works.
From the Wired website:
"Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA's greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer's weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the '60s and early '70s, while writing Gravity's Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? "
