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Elsewhere Jest

Roundup

06.28.09 | 33 Comments

The National Post’s Afterword interviewed Matthew Baldwin about the genesis of Infinite Summer.

At A Supposedly Fun Blog, several writers (including Erza Klein of the Washington Post) have assembled to blog their reading of Infinite Jest. They join Infinite Zombies, which has been doing so for the last two weeks.

Sonja describes her reading methodology. William boasts that his weblog Human Complex is “Now Infinitely Summerier”. Christine has been posting an “IJ Quote of the Day” on Naptime Writing. Ray says he’ll be writing about Infinite Jest every Wednesday at Love, Your Copyeditor.

Political blogger Atrios reveals that the title of his blog is taken from the novel.

And speaking of political bloggers, Matthew Yglesias is reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle:

I think I stumbled upon an inadvertent flaw in the Kindle. Namely, that when you read really long books—particularly as part of a quasi-group enterprise—you want to either brag about how many pages you’ve read or else whine about how many pages you’ve fallen behind. But the Kindle doesn’t have pages! Just, um, locations.

So I read 1,100 locations worth of the book. But nobody knows what that means. Normal people won’t even know if that’s a lot or a little.

In general, the Kindle strikes me as somewhat hobbled by an overly generous view of why people buy books. Not only is there this problematic lack of bragging, but with the kindle edition of the book I can’t have a handsome volume laying around the house as if to say to visitors, “why, yes, I may be a professional political pundit but I’m also a man of culture.” And I’ll have nothing on my shelf. Amazon should at least send you a sticker when you buy a book on Kindle so you can maintain some kind of display wall of all the impressive books you’ve read.

According to this page, Skylight Books in LA will give you a 15% book club discount if you mention “Infinite Summer” when buying IJ. They also say their facilities are available for meet-ups.

Here are some other people who were talking about Infinite Summer this week:

If you have recently written about Infinite Jest, please let us know in the comments or the forums.

33 Comments


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