I'm Jamie, I'm 20 years-old and starting the final year of an English Literature degree in London this september. Literature has been my primary love for as long as I can remember and, though I have eternal favourites (Joyce, T.S Eliot, Shakespeare, Dante, Yeats), my tastes are restless and I'm always dipping into unknown territory. To this end, my journey with David Foster Wallace started, sadly, with his death. I had been aware of him beforehand but had never read anything besides his essay on Roger Federer and perhaps some of the Harper's articles.
A few days after his death the Guardian newspaper ran an article from one of their columnists who seemed not just sad about a literary hero having died but genuinely moved on a personal level, as if this was a man with whom he had developed an emotional attachment through his work that made his untimely death a personal loss. This is the kind of thing I live for when it comes to literature so I made a mental note to check out more of Wallace's work and subsequently found out about Infinite Jest. Surprisingly, since it seems to have a reputation as THE serious novel of the 90s in America, it's not particularly well-known here, unless you actively seek out these kinds of things. It looked intriguing but I felt like I didn't want to read the book
because Wallace had just died so I waited a while, until the beginning of last month actually (yes, sorry, I've cheated. I'm 700 pages in now) before I started on the novel. I'm glad I did, and I'm glad there is this forum here to discuss it.
I don't know about the rest of you but so far this book has me by the throat and won't let go. I've been reading some of Wallace's other stuff online and have bought and dipped into A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and am almost positive I have found a new favourite
