I think you might like Mason & Dixon better, find the subject matter more interesting. I think I do myself, but it was the first Pynchon I tried, and I had a hard time reading more than twenty pages of it at a time - at a time when I didn't read as regularly as now, so I just gave up in the end.

Mason & Dixon starts in 18th century Britain, over Saint Helena and the Cape colony to the American colonies, about the land surveyors who drew the "Mason-Dixon line", still forming the border between a number of American states.

Or you could try Against the Day, which starts out at the Chicago World Fair in 1893, and iirc somehow manages to include the Tunguska event and other stuff around the turn of the century. But as I said, haven't finished either of them or even reached half-way, so take it for what it's worth.

I suspect each of Pynchon's books does hit a point sooner or later where you at least know what the main plotline is supposed to be, and where it's heading, it just takes a while to get there. Once you get there, it gets a bit easier to keep reading.