Infinite Summer

I'm Chele from Minneapolis. Facilities Manager, former pre-school teacher, cook, knitter, avid reader. I always like to have a "summer reading project" (left over from the days of having summer reading programs at the library). Last year it was all of the Narnia books, a couple years before that Anne Tyler.

Quite a few of my friends mentioned Infinite Summer,and I thought it sounded interesting. I'd heard of DFW but never read any of his work.

I'm reading IJ on my Kindle, so I'm glad that the schedule and forums reference locations as well as pages.

Happy Reading!

Hi. Laura, 27 from Philadelphia (G-Ho, for those of you who know Philly)

I first heard of DFW when he received the MacArthur grant, and last year I learned of his tragic death. Since then I became morbidly curious about the man's life's work, who critics almost unanimously hail as this generation's Proust and Joyce combined.

I am a student and am applying to law school in the fall. I live with my 2 year old son, husband, and Labrador Retriever. I enjoy music: indie, post-rock, electronic; avante-garde film; and cooking. The last few things I read prior to IJ - Money - Martin Amis, Waiting for the Barbarians - JM Coetzee, Windup Bird Chronicles - Murakami. I am a mildly off-putting combination Scorpio and an ENTJ. I enjoy puns, sarcasm, and haiku.

Looking forward to exchanging wit and wisdom with you all...

Hi, Laurie here.

I live in central Illinois, but Chicago will always be my home.

Reading IJ and DFW for the first time. Columbia College Chicago grad (in fiction writing, seriously!), then attended a business school to get some education that would make some money.

Have read many, many books, but this one is rapidly becoming a favorite.

Hi,
My name is Erik Bryan, and I am an editor with . We're kinda sponsoring this thing, I guess, so naturally I felt obliged to participate.
I read IJ with some friends one summer, probably the summer of '99. I thought I wouldn't remember anything, but now that I'm getting back into it, a lot is coming back. Of what's coming back, the most welcome is DFW's absurd sense of humor. I feel that with his recent suicide, a lot of the coverage and morbid interest tends toward his depression and anhedonia (a word, among hundreds, I probably wouldn't know without IJ), but he's a really, really funny guy, too, and that makes IJ, for me, a delight to read, no matter how tangential or complicated or "postmodern" (the scare quotes are meant to signify the more pretentious and generally derided aspects of this already nebulous literary "movement") the text becomes.
Anyway, I'm really glad to be here.

Hi everyone,

My name is Luke, i'm 23 years old and I live in Kent, England. I started reading IJ around a fortnight ago, before stumbling upon this here place today. To make things even more coincimental, I'm currently at the page 220 mark, and I've hit the first real bump in the road where I'm struggling a little bit, and finding it hard to concentrate right now. So it's great to discover this place and have something to help me hold my interest further. My initial frustration at having only just heard of this place has now been supplanted by the pleasure of finding it at all. I've made my IS bookmarks and everything, and really looking forward to sharing the book with so many people.

Erik - you may be excited/underwhelmed to know that Anhedonia was the working title for the film that eventually became known as Annie Hall. So enjoy that fact.

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http://lovredhatred.wordpress.com/

Web Webster, 41. I live in Franklin, TN just outside of Nashville. I write packaging, ad and web copy for a consumer electronics company. BA in English from Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. I'm blogging this experience at Webslog.com, (Actually, I'm quite pleased with myself for the headline I'm wrote for the first post on #infsum "A Supposedly Large Book I'll Read Again." [Quite pleased then more than a little embarassed at being as excited about it as I am]) and tweeting occasionally (@webslog)

I tinker with stuff. I take bad pictures (bad in the sense of quality, focus, composition etc., v. pictures that deal with sad, disturbing and/or inappropriate subjects). I have at least 12 pieces of a novella sitting around waiting for me to a) learn what a novella actually is and b) force fit them together with a heavy, blunt object. I have two kids, 11 and 7, a wonderful, infinitely patient wife of 13 years and two cats.

I've been a fan of the big book since mid-high school. As a public school student of the '80s, I didn't have assigned summer reading, but that never stopped me from plowing through as many books as I could get away with on my library card. Around sophomore year, I was packing to go off and work at Boy Scout summer camp and looking for a book; Vanity Fair sat there on the book shelf. It looked thick, summer camp was six weeks long and I was always looking for something more obscure. I've squandered every summer since on something long. Occasionally it has merit (waded through Atlas Shrugged junior year in college), more often it does not (okay, it was War and Remembrance. The Herman Wouk one)

I first read IJ in 1997 and like many of you, was drawn to the color scheme and cover design. I used to feel bad that this was the reason that I picked up the book, but by the time I'd finished, I felt like my choice based initially purely on reasons solely cosmetic was at least somewhat in the spirit of the book. It was the Summer before my son was born and I had visions of reading in the park under a tree, my wife beside me and my issue cooing happily on a quilt in the shade. I finished on his 2nd birthday.

Like many of you, my first reading demanded that I plunge through large portions of the book simply hoping not to get my eyes ripped out by endmatter, timeshifts and thorns. Part of that was inherent to the nature of trying to read a project book during the first 24 months of a baby's life. My hope is now that the kids are a little older and I'm more able to take time to myself, that I can read through the book from start to finish in a more or less sustained fashion.

Very fired up that my two great loves, reading and technology, have come together to create a community of (somewhat) like-minded souls who understand the intrinsic beauty of a large book that requires additional additional to read and understand.

Peace.

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Web
read: www.webslog.com
follow: @webslog

Jeremy / Doctoral student (biology) / Moscow, Idaho

I first read IJ because I found a hardback copy, used, for only $10, which seemed like a bargain. And, boy, was it. I'd read a lot of DFW's essays before, so I already knew I was interested in what he had to say and liked how he said it. I wasn't sure, though, that I'd hold on for the whole thing until I got to the micro-history of the video telephone. I'm no particular fan of postmodern lit, but I am a rabid fan of geeky comedy in the - vein; I'd never encountered anything before that pushed the same mental buttons as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" while saying something really disturbing about modern life.

I'd already planned to reread IJ this summer as a sort of memorium to Wallace, and I'm very excited to learn that I get to do it with such a diverse bunch of fellow-readers.

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I blog at

My name's Chip, and I'm a 32 year old code monkey from Toledo, OH. I read through IJ twice back in my college days1, and have had a couple of false starts in the ten years since then. But I've been meaning to get back into it for a while now, and this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. I'm just debating whether to stick with the clean library copy I have right now, or the one that's at my in-laws house in storage2 that has all of my notes from the second read-through.

1 - I think. I've got a bit of a memory problem due to a big stay in the hospital a year after I left college. Call it something I ate
2 - Probably will just use the library copy. 90 minute drive to the in-laws, and I'm too lazy to bother

hey guys! i'm excited to finally get a chance to pop on the computer and meet all of you. SUMMER ADVENTURE TIME!

i'm Melissa Dominic and i'm 25 years old. i'm a cyberpunk/post-apoc fiction & sci-fi nerd who collects trinkets and spends all her time writing or swimming or working. i work in early education. i live in a retirement community and i'm obsessed with the idea and ability to have internet communities and mini societies.

allow me to geek out about this little project we're all understaking!

i've never read any DFW, but, i'm looking foward to the challenge.

it's a pleasure to meetcha guys!

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:: still living cyberpunk in the post-apocalypse

Josh. Grad Student interested in teaching Post-War American Lit. Thrilled to have the opportunity to really dig into IJ finally.