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?

Infinite Blogs

Turns out a lot of people had to make up their own blogs to talk about reading IJ:

Infinite Zombies
A Supposedly Fun Blog (pretty clever name, huh?)
Infinite Tasks

Plus a whole bunch of ABDs writing about it on their own blogs.

And here we are. Welcome to the nerd club, infiniteyear.org!

I'm on page 12.

Check out our new URL!

Check it out y'all! Co-editor Keith registered us a for-real URL:

http://www.infiniteyear.org

(I added the y'all so Austin resident Morty would feel more included. I didn't want to push him any further away after this morning's post.)

Now we just sit back & wait for NPR to call and make us all famous

Page 121 plus Bad Morty, Bad!

I only got thru one 'chapter' last night but it was a tough one, jumping back & forth from discussions among the upper & lower classmen at ETA without any explanation between paragraphs.

Very difficult to work through but all illustrative of DFW's point that "Jest's unwieldy structure was a reflection of fractured contemporaneity—the impossibility of any one thing holding your attention."

Now Morty, that quote above is from that Newsweek article you sent me yesterday, and makes the point I was going to about reading the footnotes as you go along better than I could. Not to lecture you, but you should read it as DFW intended, flipping to the footnotes as you come upon them in the text.

Plus, from a practical standpoint, aren't you going to need to refer back to the text when you're reading through pages of footnotes like this one I picked at random? :

305. (she thought then)

Wouldn't going back through all the pages you just read to see what the hell he was referring to take even longer than checking the footnotes when you find them in the text? I'm just sayin'

page 310, footnote 110

I have made it to page 310, which I think puts me past the point where I'll definitely finish.  With luck, by Labor Day.  I have been wrestling with how to handle the footnotes.  At first, I just plowed through, ignoring them, not wanting to slow my momentum.  I have tackled two or three really long Norman Mailer books the past couple years, and for me the hard part is getting to the point where you're too invested to quit.  So I wanted to get 300 pages under my belt, but then I realized I was missing things DFW wanted me to read, important parts of the plot.  So, I went back and read (although kind of skimmed a lot of them) the footnotes.  And I'm glad I did.  It's sort of unfair of DFW to make us do it that way, but I can say you don't get the whole story if you ignore the notes.  But, I'm not going to keep leafing from the front to the back continuously.  So I think I'll knock out fifty or 100 pages of regular text, then go back and catch up on the notes.  The good news, I think, is that the novel is already organized in such an unorthodox way that I don't think it really matters, as long as you read everything in the end.  I really love the book; my only regret is that I didn't know it was a 2009 cultural trend, so I feel kind of like a bandwagon jumper onner.  Same time, it's cool to think of all the other people doing the work and getting a lot out of it.  I'll also confess that I read the wikipedia entry for Infinite Jest, and that has taken a little of the pressure off in that it spoon feeds you a little bit of the story, and explains the characters a little, without spoiling any big plot twists.  I don't feel guilty about it, in fact I think it made it a lot more likely that I will stick with it, and has made the book even more enjoyable.

Infinite Procrastination is more like it

My Infinite Summer arrived with a couple of long plane rides and the (now regretful) decision to read Richard Price's Lush Life which I got for a buck at the Norfolk Public Library. I'm half-way through it and will start on IJ when I'm done -- probably in two weeks.

But...but....but! I noticed that the dog-ear in Infinite Jest is on page 222. That must be where I left off a few years back. Hopefully I'll just be able to skim my way up there. Hopefully. Yeah. Um hum.

Page 109

Stayed up til past 11:30 last night & pushed on through past 100 & stopped at chapter break on page 109. I really am enjoying it but it's still pretty daunting to have 900+ pages left & SO DAMN HEAVY! I thought about beinging it to read on the bus today but it made my bag as heavy as when my laptop is in there so I decided against.

Maybe it's finally time to pick up a kindle...

Page 95

The go-getters at InfiniteSummer.org are now up to page 300. I'm on page 97. Tried like hell to get to page 100 last night but sleep won out. Long days in the car on Sat & Sun going back & forth to Mount Rainier got the best of me. I'll get into the triple digits tonight, for sure.

Note: Corrected this post - It originally said page 97 but I was really on page 95.