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.