Infinite Summer

Blog

  • How Did I Get Here?

    The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

    Way back awhile ago, Matthew e-mailed me and said, I’m thinking of doing this thing, would you like to do it, too? And I was all, HELL NO. Why don’t you ask mimi smartypants, she’s the secretary/treasurer of the David Foster Wallace Fan Club. It was my way of saying, thanks, but don’t you want a qualified literary opinion-giver along on this trek? I can barely parse Dr. Seuss.

    Then I didn’t hear from Matthew for like three months, so I was all, WHEW! Now I can go back to knitting this sock. But then, of course, Matthew followed up4 and said that mimi had declined — having already read the book three times5 she wasn’t up for number four.

    Then, sensing my reluctance to flaunt my intellectual weaknesses about the Internet, Matthew went on to say a bunch of wildly flattering things about me, like that mine was one of the first blogs he ever read, and that I gave him the idea upon which he built that Nobel Prize-winning physics thing he did about God.

    My only qualification for being an Infinite Summer guide seems to be that I, too, once picked up Infinite Jest and failed to finish it. I didn’t even PAY for my copy, I was working in a bookstore at the time and got one free from the Little, Brown rep. Apart from my anxiety about committing to a Big Book at the time,6 what bothered me most about the book was the cheap advance-copy binding, the way the cover curled up and over itself when the humidity rose above 15%. I eventually donated it to the Planned Parenthood book sale.

    I remember the book being about tennis, which is a sport I enjoy playing once or twice a year. I was varsity in high school, but the coach said that even though I had some talent, I just didn’t appear to want to work very hard.7

    However, as your sherpa, I vow to come up with something moderately insightful to say each week.8

  • Mountaineering

    The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

    I don’t know why I own Infinite Jest.

    Well, let me clarify. I know the reason I own it: it is, by all accounts, exactly the sort of narrative I most enjoy. I love novels that bend, and then break, and then place into a woodchipper the conventional narrative structure. I adore films where you spend the majority of your time wondering what in the hell is going on. I am helplessly addicted to a TV show that has spent the last five years opening matryoshkas, only to reveal smaller dolls within.

    Reputably, Infinite Jest is all these and more.1 So the reasons for my ownership are obvious.

    What I am unclear on is why I own it. Like, the actual mechanics by which the book came to be in my possession. Presumably someone, at someone point, urged me to invest in a copy, but I don’t recall purchasing it. Or borrowing it. Or finding it on a suitcase in a railway station, attached to a note reading “Please look after this bear of a novel.”

    Indeed, most of my memories of Infinite Jest revolve around bending over to retrieve something off the floor of our computer room–a pen the cat has batted off the desk, say, or a sheet of paper the printer has ejected with a whit too much enthusiasm–and seeing it, lurking on the bottom shelf,2 wedged between Underworld and Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days (the former with a spine suspiciously pristine, the latter looking like it’s gone through the dryer). “Remember that night?” it asks. “The night we spent on the redeye from Washington D.C.? You read 120 page of me, promised we would stay together until the end. What happened?” I avert my eyes, quickly straighten, and flee. This may well explain why the floor of the computer room is two inches deep in abandoned pens and Google Maps hard copies.

    In addition to Infinite Jest, here is a list of other David Foster Wallace works that I have somehow failed to read: all of them. Or at least that was the case two month ago, when I first envisioned this crazy event. Since then I have been wolfing down DFW essays as a golden retriever would a dropped ice cream sandwich.

    Among the first was The View from Mrs. Thompson’s, which contains this train-wreck of a sentence:

    The house I end up sitting with clots of dried shampoo in my hair watching most of the actual unfolding Horror at belongs to Mrs. Thompson, who is one of the world’s cooler 74-year-olds and exactly the kind of person who in an emergency even if her phone is busy you know you can just come on over.

    Honestly, if I hadn’t already announced Infinite Summer, that might have been its end. It’s not the worst sentence I’ve ever seen,3 but I had to go over it three times just to parse, and thought of reading 1,079 pages thrice over the summer struck me as even more insane than the original proposal.

    My trepidation lasted exactly 24 hours, until, halfway through his amazing essay Shipping Out (PDF), I stumbled across this thing of wonder:

    Only later do I learn that that little Lebanese Deck-l0 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck-l0 Head Porter, who had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who received confirmed reports that a passenger had been seen carrying his own bag up the port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded a rolling Lebanese head for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and the Austrian Chief Steward had reported the incident to a ship’s officer in the Guest Relations Department, a Greek guy with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag.

    Holy great jeezum crow almighty. It is clear that the peaks in Wallace’s writing are an order of magnitude greater than the occasional valleys.

    And based on the first 20 pages of Infinite Jest, at looks as though the peaks in this novel will be so plentiful that altitude sickness will pose the biggest threat. Like a climber headed toward his first summit, I am filled with an excitement tinged with apprehension, and a hope that I have enough oxygen for the journey.

  • Jason Kottke: Forward

    Jason Kottke has written the weblog kottke.org since March of 1998. The archive of his Infinite Jest commentary can be found here.

    Is everyone in here yet? Yes? Ok.

    I’m thrilled to kick off Infinite Summer with this here Forward. Before we get started, I have a disclaimer to offer. Well, actually several related disclaimers which, taken together, should convince you that I am not at all qualified to speak to you about the literary or cultural impact of Infinite Jest and its author on contemporary American society. Apologies if that’s what you’re here for; in that case I can refer you to Dave Eggers’ foreword in the new paperback copy of IJ.

    Now, the first disclaimer: I was not an English major. In fact, I don’t even read that much fiction. In the past five years, I have read The Corrections, Infinite Jest (for the second time), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Pride and Prejudice, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, nearly half of 2666, and that’s about it, give or take some Lord of the Rings. I will be of little assistance in helping you to understand how Infinite Jest fits into the canon of American literature, past or present.

    Writing is something I don’t know a great deal about either. I earn my keep as a blogger, which profession most people assume is synonymous with writing but really isn’t, in the same way that basketball players run but aren’t runners and architects draw but aren’t, uh, drawers. I love Wallace’s writing in IJ and elsewhere but beyond that, I can’t tell you why it’s good, who his writing was influenced by, who he influences, or what the purpose of his complex sentence structure and grammatical tics is. (Or should that be “are”? (See what I’m talking about?))

    Furthermore, I do not play tennis, haven’t suffered from depression, have never been addicted to anything (except perhaps Tetris on the original Game Boy), don’t know the Boston area that well, haven’t attended an _______ Anonymous meeting, and did not go to a small college in New England, all things that Wallace pulled from his life experience and wove together in the IJ narrative. Does Wallace accurately convey to the reader the pressures felt by the exceptional junior tennis player? Does the AA stuff ring true? What about the addiction aspects of the novel? I can help you with none of those questions.

    But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs. Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares…the story stands on its own. You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.

    And and and! It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

    And so, readers: Forward. I wish you way more than luck.

  • Battening Down the Hatches

  • Colin Meloy: Why I am Reading Infinite Jest

    Colin Meloy is the lead singer and songwriter for the band The Decemberists. Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love.

    I think I bought my copy of Infinite Jest in 1997. To be honest, I don’t know what inspired the purchase. Had I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again? Probably. I don’t know why I would’ve bought a book by an unknown author that weighed in somewhere north of 1000 pages. Regardless, it was so long ago that I don’t remember actually buying it. All I know is that it has sat in my book collection for 12 years, unread. My copy of Infinite Jest dates back to the days when it was surrounded by book spines that sported those yellow “USED” stickers. When my collection of books was meager, overly-academic and usually supported on a bookshelf made of pine planks and cinder blocks. It distinguished itself from its neighbors by its girth and by the fact that I had not been obliged to buy it for some class. Volunteer book purchases were pretty seldom back then. I can only assume that my buying Infinite Jest came from a similar place as the impulse to buy Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation when I was thirteen and I had fifteen bucks and a personal mandate to buy my first compact disc. Fifteen dollars was an afternoon’s lawn-mowing and Daydream Nation was a double record–I had to get my money’s worth. I was more broke than I’ve ever been in 1997. I was working at a coffee shop in Missoula, Montana. The owner was a black guy from LA who had fallen in love with Missoula en route to a Rainbow Gathering the summer before and sported one of the most obviously fake names I’d ever heard: Harley Evergreen. He’d had a brief stint in the music business (a record produced by T. Bone Burnett!) and was wildly paranoid; he carried a pistol in the back of his pants wherever he went. He had a habit of withholding taxes from our checks, even though we’d never filled out a W2. He ended up splitting town owing thousands of dollars in back rent and unpaid taxes. His Jeep was left parked out front, festooned with ignored parking tickets. I lived mostly off the terrible tips from that coffee shop. My roommates and I used to get bread out of the garbage bin behind one of the local bakeries. We exercised miserly stinginess on our daily expenditures so we could blow our twenty dollar bills on nights at Charlies’ Bar. Buying a new paperback was not high on the list of priorities, but somehow, in 1997, I bought a copy of Infinite Jest. Now that I think about it, it must’ve been on the strength of A Supposedly Fun Thing … I had loved those essays’ intelligence and humor, particularly the pretty novel use of footnotes and how those tangential digressions could blossom into their own mini-essays. I seem to remember picking up Infinite Jest with excitement and gusto and ambition and … boom, stopped on the 100th page or so. I don’t think I could transition from Wallace, the callow, cynical but deeply funny observer in A Supposedly Fun Thing … to the Novelist Wallace, freed of the constraints of non-fiction. So back to the plank-and-cinder-block shelf it went. It followed me across the country, through every apartment, duplex, warehouse, and house I moved to. Across two states, two time zones. I’m recalling this passage of time through the eyes–or the spine–of the book like one of those somber montages where the subject grows old and disregarded, its pages foxed and faded, its once-brilliant spine becoming sunbleached illegible.

    Until now.

    Pulling it off the shelf is like sticking one heel of my shoe in a time machine. I can smell the stale bread, the whiff of burnt coffee, the reek of incense coming up from Mr Evergreen’s residence below the coffee shop (he lived in the basement). But I think I’m more prepared now to handle the heft of the text than I was then. I certainly spend more time on airplanes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I feel as if I’m being reunited with an old friend; rather, I feel like I’m unlocking the door and setting free a bizarre and feral child from a dusty garret I had locked it in 12 years ago. Should be a good summer.

  • Roundup

    Michael made some Infinite Summer bookmarks with the schedule printed right on them. We were totally going to do the same thing, but whatever we would have cooked up would have looked pretty lame compared to those.

    In addition to creating a Google Calendar and iCal calendar for the I.S. schedule, James also says he’ll be blogging his reading of the novel at his website.

    Ralph created a Google Apps Progress Tracker. “I’m not graphic designer, obviously, so it’s very very plain right now,” he says. “But any and all suggestions welcome.”

    At Infinite Zombies, five six seven writers intend to chronicle their reading of the book in a format they describe as “part book club, part Fight Club“.

    Carolina created a Flickr pool. Photos are also being posted on the Facebook wall.

    The Infinite Summer Ravelry group has hit 50 members. The Goodreads page has 87. The LiveJournal community continues to grow.

    Bitch Ph.D says she’s on board. Marc says that, on June 21st, he’s going to turn his weblog into “my own journal of the Infinite Summer project/book club.” Kev and Emily are going to “post our gchat convos while we read infinite jest.

    Katie is keeping track of her favorite DFW quotations of a Tumblelog. Someone is tweeting Infinite Jest 140 characters at a time on Twitter.

    Meg is trying to talk her wedding guests into reading the novel so everyone will have something to talk about at the reception.

    And here are some other folks who are talking about the project:

    If you’ll be blogging along, let us know in the comments.

  • How to Read Infinite Jest

    The following was drafted by Matt Bucher (maintainer of the wallace-l listserv and author of this post), and augmented by input from Nick Maniatis (administrator of The Howling Fantods, a site devoted to DFW), and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (professor at Pomona College, who teaches a course entitled David Foster Wallace).

    There’s no wrong way to read Infinite Jest: front-to-back, upside-down, cut in half, or skipping around. But here are a few tips for the Infinite Jester.

    1. Read the endnotes: Please. They are not boring bibliographic details, but rather an integral part of the text. And the bouncing back-and-forth is a feature, not a bug.
    2. Use bookmarks: Yes “bookmarks”, plural: one for the main text and one for the endnotes. Doing so will save you hours of searching, and the aggravation of losing your place several times an hour.
    3. Persevere to page 200: There are several popular way stations on the road to abandoning Infinite Jest. The most heavily trafficked by far is “The Wardine Section”. Where the opening pages of IJ are among the best written in the book, page 37 (and many pages thereafter) are in a tortured, faux-Ebonics type dialect. “Wardine say her momma ain’t treat her right.” “Wardine be cry.” Potentially offensive (if one wants to be offended), and generally hard to get through. Hang in there, ignore the regional parlance, and focus on what the characters are doing. Like most things in the book, you’ll need to know this later. Likewise for the other rough patches to be found in the first fifth of the novel.
    4. Trust the author: Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going, subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.
    5. Flag, copy, or bookmark page 223: Page 223 of the novel contains some information that you will either need to internalize or refer to frequently to make sense of the narrative. Once you reach it, flag the page with a stickie, dogear the corner, photocopy the material, stick a (third) bookmark there–whatever will ensure that you can find this information when you need it.
    6. Don’t do the thing you’re dying to do right now: Namely, flip to page 223 to see what we’re talking about. David Foster Wallace ordered the book the way he did for a reason, and part of step 4 above is respecting that. In fact, we encourage you to take the fingers-in-the-ears “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” approach to spoilers in general.
    7. Abuse your copy: When you are finished, 223 should be just one of many mutilated pages in your novel. Liberal use of tape flags, post-it notes, highlighting, or your anal-retentive page marking device of choice, as a means of keeping track of key passages you think you might like to come back to (or share with others), is encouraged. (Note: the preceding advice is not recommended for those reading on the Kindle.) If you can’t bring yourself to work over your only copy of Infinite Jest, consider investing in a second.
    8. Keep notes: As if lugging around a book the size of a 2 br. 1¼ bath apartment isn’t enough, you may want to carry a notebook as well. You won’t always have the requisite Oxford English Dictionary within arm’s reach, you know. If you are currently studying the English language, you may take an ielts online test to gauge your progress.
    9. Brush up on your Hamlet: It’s no coincidence that the first two words of Hamlet are “Who’s there?” and the first two words of Infinite Jest are “I am”. Even the novel’s title was lifted from the play.

      As you read, it behooves you keep in mind the relationships between the characters in Shakespeare’s drama (the ghost, poor Yorick, etc.) and the central themes of the play. You can find a brief primer here.

    10. Employ a reader’s guide: There are two companion guides that you may find helpful. One is Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Burn’s guide is rather short (96 pages), but it includes a helpful chronology , as well as sections on the novel’s critical reception and key plot points.

      Another guide is Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. [Full disclosure: Bucher is the editor & publisher of the Carlisle book.] Elegant Complexity is different than the Burn guide in that it offers a summary and exegesis on every section of the novel–and that it’s 512 pages long. Also included are chronologies, family trees, thematic discussions, and a map of the tennis academy.

    11. Use online references: There are copious webpages out there that the first-time Jesters will find useful. Here are a a few:

      You can find links to more resources at The Howling Fantods.

      Obviously many of these sites contain spoilers, so poke a hole in an index card and only view your monitor through that while visiting one.

  • The Schedule

    Clip ‘n’ Save: it’s your summer syllabus. Note that “location” refers to the Kindle.

    Date Page

    		Location Percent Complete
    Fri, Jun 26 63 1522 6%
    Mon, Jun 29 94 2233 9%
    Fri, Jul 03 137 3236 13%
    Mon, Jul 06 168 3900 17%
    Fri, Jul 10 210 4844 21%
    Mon, Jul 13 242 5561 24%
    Fri, Jul 17 284 6545 28%
    Mon, Jul 20 316 7250 32%
    Fri, Jul 24 358 8174 36%
    Mon, Jul 27 390 8869 39%
    Fri, Jul 31 432 9832 44%
    Mon, Aug 03 464 10556 47%
    Fri, Aug 07 506 11510 51%
    Mon, Aug 10 537 12243 54%
    Fri, Aug 14 580 13233 59%
    Mon, Aug 17 611 13925 62%
    Fri, Aug 21 653 14900 66%
    Mon, Aug 24 685 15628 69%
    Fri, Aug 28 727 16554 74%
    Mon, Aug 31 759 17293 77%
    Fri, Sep 04 801 18315 81%
    Mon, Sep 07 833 19021 84%
    Fri, Sep 11 875 19972 89%
    Mon, Sep 14 907 20767 92%
    Fri, Sep 18 949 21708 96%
    Mon, Sep 21 981 22403 100%

    At the end of each specified day, you should be at or past the given page number or location.

    Question! If, as we’ve said, we don’t care when people start, when they finish, or how fast they go in the meantime, why even have a schedule? Two reason. First, some folks just operate better with milestones. Second, the schedule denotes the Spoiler Line for any given day. For instance, on July 6th we ask that you confine your discussion to only those events that transpire on page 168 of the novel and earlier; on August 17th anything past page 653 is verboten; and so forth. The Spoiler Line will hold both on the posts here and in the Daily Discussion forum. If you find yourself ahead of the pack and eager to chat with like-minded overachievers, or if you’re already read Infinite Jest and wish to talk about the novel in its entirety, what we ask that you do so in the Infinite Jest General Discussion Forum, where there are no spoiler restrictions whatsoever.

    A note about the endnotes: The above schedule does not take the endnotes into account. And as some endnotes are long (like, 14 pages worth of long), that means the actual amount of weekly reading will vary. But, you know, it’s like agreeing to always divide the check up evenly when dining with friends: you may have to chip in a bit more occasionally, but it’s better than haggling over the math.
    A note about editions: As it turns out, all (physical) edition of Infinite Jest have 981 pages: the one from 1996, the one from 2004, the paperback, the hardcover, etc. A big thank you to the men and women in the publishing industry who were kind and/or lazy enough to keep things consistent. A note about the Kindle: At first we thought that we could simply take the 22260 locations in Infinite Jest and divide them by 93 days, as we did with the number of pages, to compute the number of locations one would need to read daily. In practice, however, our location milestones wound up pretty discrepant from our page milestones, and we wanted to ensure that all Infinite Summer participants were on the same page, figuratively and literally, during our discussions. So what we finally wound up doing was compiling a list of 26 unique phrases–one from the bottom of page 21, one from the bottom of page 63, one from the bottom of page 94, etc.–and sending them to Friend of Infinite Summer and Swell Guy Tarun who looked up each on his Kindle and reported back with all of the corresponding locations. Thanks Tarun! You can find the list of unique phrases here.

  • Matt Bucher: Why Read Infinite Jest?

    Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times.

    I first saw the novel in the window at the old Tattered Cover in Cherry Creek, Denver. I was a college sophomore and my teacher had earlier assigned us a few selections from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction. One of those was “Lyndon” by David Foster Wallace. I wasn’t that impressed by the story, but the name stuck with me. And when I saw it again on Infinite Jest, written in tall, skinny, black-on-clouds letters, it all but leaped out at me.

    I liked the title, the fat stack of pages, but it was $30 or so and I was a bargain shopper. It came out in paperback in the fall of 1997 and almost immediately the Tattered Cover had a mountain of them in the bargain department for $8.99 each. They were stacked in a large square, three or four feet high, each book a brick in tower, near the cash registers. How could I resist?

    My first attempt at reading the book sputtered out about 300 pages in. Classes got in the way. And yet, I knew then that Infinite Jest would become my favorite book. I had never felt so connected to 300 pages. I spent much of Winter Break 1997 in bed with the novel, alternately savoring it and plowing through it. I remember skipping some sections and obsessively rereading others.

    The first paperback printing was a strip-and-bind of the hardcover and so the same paper stock bound in paper covers is a good inch taller than the later reprintings. In the years since I first bought that paperback edition, I’ve purchased about ten other copies of the book (either to collect or loan out), but to this day, that first paperback remains my “reading copy.” Before the days of Amazon’s Search Inside! and samizdat hyperlinked-PDFs, you actually had to flip through the book to find all the instances of the word “moon” or all the mentions of a specific prorector. This was tedious and time-consuming, but pulling apart the strands of a work of art had never felt so rewarding. Even 11 or 12 years ago you could go looking for deep discussion about Infinite Jest and find it online. The wallace-l list and the first Howling Fantods message boards were an oasis for me, where I could proudly fly my nerd flag and dig into the minutiae of the book.

    One of the first realizations I had about the novel was that there was no magic key to unlocking all of its secrets. Many of the discrepancies and mysteries in the book were not there to be “solved” in any traditional sense. It is still fun to debate some of the fundamental questions about the novel, but there are no definitive answers. Even if DFW himself said “Here’s what really happened…” you could refute his argument with sound logic from the book.

    In subsequent re-reads, in my 20s, I identified mostly with the younger character of Hal. But now, in my 30s, I find myself most interested in the older Gately, who struggles to be a responsible, sober adult. Trying to understand these characters has occupied a slice of my mental energy for over a decade now. Somehow, it still seems vital to figure out what happens to them, what motivates them, why they make the choices they do. The same could be said of Hamlet or Othello or Lady Macbeth: outside of the beauty of the language, why do these characters persist? I encourage you to find out for yourself.

    But, the thing that keeps people coming back to this book, that keeps them engaged for 1000+ pages, is not the mysteries of the subplots but the raw emotion on the page, the honest feelings laid bare. A persistent theme of the novel is the struggle to sincerely connect with the world. In the process of describing this struggle, Wallace ends up building a connection, a trust, with the reader. Of course this connection made Wallace’s death feel all the more raw and jagged to his readers, present company included.

    Infinite Jest is my desert-island book, a book that I could not wring all the pleasure from if I squeezed for a century. I’ll forever ignore the haters and say I’m happy to have found this thing that instructs, that entertains, that loves.

  • The Book Before

    If Twitter is to be believed (and when has it ever done us wrong?), many of you have already begun reading your copy of Infinite Jest. And that’s okay. As we’ve said in the past, doing so is perfectly permissible under the rules. Ya big cheaters.

    The rest of us, meanwhile, are frantically trying to finish whatever currently sits on our nightstand, in anticipation of the big event.

    We asked The Guides what they are reading, and if they would recommend it to an Infinite Summer participant who was looking to pick up something on, say, September 23rd. Here are their replies.

    Kevin Guilfoile: The book I’m finishing (with Infinite Jest on deck) is The Great Perhaps by one of my favorite Chicago writers Joe Meno. It’s probably Meno’s most ambitious book to date, a chronicle of a barely functioning family of Chicago liberals around the time of the 2004 election with generational flashbacks going back more than a hundred years. A terrific book to wind down with in September.

    Eden M. Kennedy: I am currently finishing up More Information Than You Require by John Hodgman. I would heartily recommend it to people who like funny books full of made-up facts (“lies” in other words).

    Matthew Baldwin: I just completed the 2004 novel Body of Lies by David Ignatius, about a US spy stationed in Jordan who cooks up an elaborate Trojan Horse-style scheme to take down an al-Qaeda faction from the inside. The plot is by-the-numbers espionage stuff honestly, but Ignatius (a mild mannered Washington Post columnist by day) clearly knows a metric ton about the subject matter, and his portrayal of post-9/11 CIA agents railing against the bureaucracy that they perceive as soft and restrictive is fascinating in juxtaposition with the conversation we are currently having in this country regarding the use of “enhanced interrogation.”

    Avery Edison: I must ashamedly confess that I’m not actually reading anything in the run-up — and haven’t for a while. Reading the Internet has kind of replaced regular old book reading for me, and that’s something I’m hoping to address with this project. It’s sad that I’ve gotten to the stage where I need a weekly writing commitment to force me to read, but I guess we’ll just chalk me up as one of those “Facebook generation” people who knows how to hack into the Pentagon, War Games-style, but can’t make a slice of toast.

    Seriously, I miss toast. I have a P.O. Box address if someone would like to mail me a slice. Buttered, please.

    The comments are open. Let us know what you are wrapping up, and if it’s worthy of a recommendation. And you may want to bookmark this thread as well, to revisit in a month or three.