Infinite Summer

Love the idea of a Tunnel Club, am presuming that the male-only rule is lifted

Having read Ulysses, and I say "read" rather than "absorbed" or "understood" (I only finished it because my mother bet me £5 I wouldn't, and I was at that time an impoverished student), also living in a place that gets swamped every Bloomsday as I'm less than 1/2 mile from the Martello tower of the opening sequence, and that place being in Dublin - I'm sick to the back teeth of the thing. Personal anti-Ulysses bias, declared. (1)

I'd love to read 2666, but am in agreement that some sort of palate cleanser is probably in order (am reading a Jim Butcher next, following up with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, because as a bookseller it is a point of shame to me that I have thus far only read a single book off this year's Man Booker list).

To be honest, I'll read anything the Tunnel Club decides on. Even the dreaded Joyce (again). Reading IJ this time 'round, in this company, was far more fulfilling (for me) than back in '97, when I knew that I loved it, but didn't entirely "get" it.

(1) Interesting story - I studied English and Linguistics at UCD, where there was a bit of verbal sparring on a yearly basis, between two lecturers at odds on the worth of Joyce butting into one another's lectures. All I really took away from the sparring was an assertion by one of them that w/r/t Finnegans Wake (sic) "Life's too short". To further confirm this, there was a discussion group in a hotel across the road where people would try to eke meaning(s) from the book (FW), sometimes a word at a time. In 1991, they had been doing same for a decade. I sometimes wonder if they're still there.

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Forget your troubles, c'mon, get happy...
-Leland Palmer

The idea of IS immediately appealed to me in large part because I already had a copy of Infinite Jest that I'd started a long time ago and then never finished. I'm not sure I would have joined in if the book in question had been anything else, and I don't think I'd stick around for further DFW books.

OTOH, I do also have a started-but-not-finished copy of Gravity's Rainbow too... so if "Infinite Summer" turned into "Reading Rainbow" ( ) I might stick around.

I guess maybe if this was going to happen, you'd have to expect that there would be a lot of turnover each "season", and plan accordingly. Eg, you'd want to encourage people to re-blog about the project before each new book, to get people talking about it and draw in newcomers, and you'd want to have a low-traffic blog/mailing list/forum that would just announce the new books (and/or announce surveys for picking new books), so that IS participants who decided to sit out Ulysses could still come back for... Dhalgren or whatever. ("to wound the autumnal book club"!!)

Whatever book is chosen for the "Tunnel Club," I'm in for it.

This whole experience has just been too much fun to drop.

I'm pretty much committed to Gravity's Rainbow, having joined the #gravrain contingent on twitter. Though it's competing for my time with a bunch of other stuff, so we'll see. There's talk of starting on the 7th at this site: http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... nchon.html but I am hoping it waits til IS is over.

Haha. I finished IJ a week or two before IS started; now I just got through a good chunk of Gravity's Rainbow, and there's talk of "Reading Rainbow" (which I love, btw). Help, my reading list is being chased by an online community!!

(or... maybe IJ followed by GR is not all that uncommon, but neveryoumindthat)

What about, for the down time between Dracula and 2666:

White Teeth
60 Stories
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Not all of them, I mean, though.
And these are just in my opinion.

Hi guys, this is my first contribution to the forum.
Want to say thanks to the organizers of this Infinite Summer which gave me just the motivation I needed to read this book and love it. I finished it a couple of weeks.
I was thinking what would happen when the IJ mission would be accomplished and I am super happy to see you are going (I should say we) to read other stuff together! I will skip Dracula but I am happy to join the 2666 group.
As other suggestions: some De Lillo and Pynchon, White Teeth (cause I own it already), then I can recommend ', which I would like to re-read with you. Maybe also . But there are many others worth reading as well of course.

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Denial is not a river in Egypt

I really do think "House of Leaves" is a great book to read after "Infinite Jest." Then again, I may just be saying that because I'm reading it...

But there are a lot of weird parallels. For instance, they're both about a film that may not actually exist, and their central character doesn't narrate--as a photographer (or lensmaker) Navidson is a figurant. Both have endnotes (and actual footnotes, in this one). And they both have a strange fixation with blue, specifically the phrase "out of the blue." Oh, and perception is a huge plot point in both, just as the limits of space (hence infinity between 0 and 1, or any two boundaries) are tested in both. Perhaps that'll be the book between Dracula (which I'm not interested in) and 2666.