so I finished Infinite Jest...

[americnxidiot]

And I'm a little baffled.
And stunned.
And impressed.
And I'm going to be thinking about this for a long time.

Comments

[americnxidiot]

Eggers actually wrote the forward to my edition of IJ. I didn't read it at first, because I've read introductions before that spoiled the book (idiots), but he's pretty funny. There's a section in here... well a lot of them that I really agree with:

"And now, unfortunately, we're back to the impression that this books is daunting. Which it isn't, really. It's long, but there are pleasures everywhere. There is humor everywhere. There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love."

[americnxidiot]

This is the version I have, the 10th anniversary edition:

http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-INFINITE-TENTH-ANNIVERSAR/dp/B002HLXQD8/ref=sr_1_32?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278485230&sr=8-32

I'm also struggling a bit with the feelings of inadequacy that follow reading a book like this that was started when he was 29 and finished when he was 33 haha. But otherwise, yes. Incredibly happy I pushed through it.

[americnxidiot]

Definitely ping me if you do. All I want to do now is talk about it, and no one has read it! Or at least no one's made it all the way through. There's one girl on twitter who was reading it at the same time as me, so I'm about to go look her up and bug her to chat about it haha.

[kcerena]

Congrats on finishing!! Sorry I can't chat with you about the end yet :-p Definitely been taking the savor approach to this book-- I remember my favorite English prof telling us how he thought Proust was meant to be read for about five pages a sitting, and I decided to experiment with something close to that for IJ. Can't bring myself to stop after just five pages (lol), but it's been helping me a lot to take breaks and reread earlier chaps sometimes. Maybe I'm feeling the novelty of not being in college and forced to finish books super-fast anymore, so we'll see how many post-grad years it takes for that to wear off

[americnxidiot]

I won't spoil for you. I was kind of forced to read this pretty quickly (hah @ a month and four days being quickly) since I started summer classes. It was really hard to make myself read other texts for class when I had this to read. I haven't read much of Wallace besides this and one essay on going home to Illinois, but I'd really like to, especially now.

I will say I definitely need to read this again, because there was a lot of foreshadowing. And hell, I'm pretty convinced he used foreshadowing for about 3 different possible scenarios more than once, so I'm still not entirely sure what I think about some things.

I think I remember reading that part when Joelle tries to demap herself as just an explosively descriptive drug overdose. I'll have to read it again, cause yea, I missed so much.

[kcerena]

I think it would be interesting-- if really sacreligious-- to go back and read the chapters in chronological order. The story would be seem good in a different way, and maybe even read pretty accessibly, especially since so much of the 'foreshadowing' is just retrospective for stuff you don't get to read until later. I wonder how easy it would be to figure out why he ordered things the way he did. What do you think of the language decisions he makes, BTW? I feel like he might use all those acronyms and colloquialisms to counteract the way that the idea density makes the sentences hard to read. It inspired me to start using more e.g.'s, slang, etc. in my scientific writing (I keep waiting for my advisor to smack me for it, and he hasn't yet!)

[americnxidiot]

I think it's particularly interesting in chapters that are 3rd person limited with Don Gately. He's not very smart so he mishears stuff all the time (i.e. he thinks toxemia = noxema), and you have to adjust to someone basically mishearing things.

I did bookmark pg. 222 which listed all of the subsidized years in chronological order:

1. Year of the Whopper
2. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
3. Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
4. Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
5. Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
6. Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic7. Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland

[kcerena]

I just started from the beginning again, and it almost feels like reading different book. It's more emotional when all the foreshadowed stuff makes sense, as in, you notice when he uses the word "nubbin." This time, I cried during the part where Mario's listening to Madame Psychosis:

"One of the reasons Mario's obsessed with her show is that he's somehow sure Madame Psychosis cannot herself sense the compelling beauty and light she projects over the air, somehow. He has visions of interfacing with her and telling her she'd feel a lot better if she listened to her own show, he bets."

Doesn't that give you visions of going back in time and telling DFW to read his own book?