Finished too!

Got 'er done at 1:45 am.

I loved it too. The ending was not what I expected but with the length and density of this book, it could have ended in 1000 different ways and still had people scratching their heads for different reasons.

Anyone care to discuss? Morty?

Steady Progress

I'm up to page 575 & enjoying it more and more the deeper I get into it - just found out why the garbage is launched into the Great Concavity - pretty crazy stuff. How this all came out of one guy's head & how he published it when he was only 34 really is incredible.

ALSO: I read that according to all the clues dropped in IJ, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (when most of the book takes place) seems to be either 2009 or 2011.

So I'm really glad to be reading it this year, and I think I'll read it again in 2011.

Who's with me?

Finished!

Now I may start again, seriously.

Loved it.

I bought the book early in the summer, not realizing it was something of a cultural phenomenon at the time.  I find it funny, now that I've read it and am doing a little after the fact research (want to see what the reviewers at the time had to say) that the word "hipster" is used so often.  I think of the book as sad, big hearted, challenging and funny, and I don't associate any of those things with being a hipster.

And for the record, I was off base in my original approach to the footnotes.  I didn't flip back and forth every time, but I only let myself fall three or four footnotes behind at a time.  

Century Mark

I hit the century mark last night. Should we talk at all on this site about what the book is actually about?

Pacific Heights

This is a total aside. For some reason I thought I mentioned that I was reading a book by a guy who was a friend in college, but I don't see it here so it must have been elsewhere. Anyway, he and I were in a few creative writing classes together before he dropped out of UM and went back to California. My fondest memory was when he was asked by Lester Goran to read his autobiographical piece to the class, and every third word started with F and ran four letters.

Anyway, so I saw his name in the Tidewater Community College bookstore on a novel, Boonville, read it, and was checking today to see if there's anything else out there by him, and it turns out the guy married into a fortune. A true fortune. Like married-to-the-dead-co-founder-of-Oracle-oh-my-gosh fortune.

Here's a picture of the house he and his spouse built in Pacific Heights a few years back:

Ain't that a kick in the head.

Thanks for the bookmark, Jim

This is the fanciest bookmark I've ever owned. I was using a sticky and a business card to keep track of front and rear places in the book -- now I'll try using just this one. Thank you, Jim, for sending it across the country.

I still have not completed a single week's worth of reading according to the infinitesummer.org reading schedule. I'm on page 65. Last night I read the full footnote about Orin Incandenza's life's work in film. Every time I see Year of the Whopper, it cracks me up. Buried in there are four attempts to create Infinite Jest, and all are incomplete, lost and unseen. What does that mean?

An old colleague of mine from the University of Miami wrote this book called Understanding David Foster Wallace. I noticed on Amazon that it's being re-released at the end of this month--I wonder how much Matthew Baldwin's project had to do with that. Anyway, his Alternative Atlanta is a decent book. Not good enough to get me to buy his other one, but a fun read.

Page 173

I had a good week last week & did the 75 pages that Infinitesummer.org prescribes for the first time, but not sure if I'll be able to keep that up with houseguests (Mom & Reg) arriving tomorrow & staying thru the end of next week.

I'll do my best. How are you guys all doing?