The Schedule

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

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.