Infinite Summer

From now on forum-based co-reading is the only way to go for me. It combines my two newest interests, having recently become a shut-in (back injury, long boring story) who's spent the last seven or so years trying to get paid to either work with books or computers. I would never be into a face-time meet-up book club. It's not that I don't like the social part, it's just that generally I think that there is a time and a place for drinking a pint and bullshitting about literature, and it's when one is trying to get into another's pants. This, here, I am doing with all of my pants on, when I feel like reading, and there's always someone else around to post back and say something smart of funny. I don't wanna stop after this book is over!

Does anyone know of a good online-only book discussion forum similar to this one? I don't want no granny Oprah-type-book discussion groups (nothing against grannies, sometimes they read edgier books than I do). I want young and young at heart, intellectual or intellectual-at-heart. Anybody know of anything like that? Anybody want to start up anything like that?

Hmm, well, I have to disagree with part of what you wrote in that I think there is value to both in-person and online reading groups, but if you are looking for more online book clubs www.goodreads.com has some. There is one that reads a book from the list 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die every month.

I actually decided to start something similar once I realized how brilliant of a concept IS is. I'm going to start it up after I finish IJ, but I have the site set up right now. So far it just has a section-by-section synopsis of IJ up, but feel free to check it out. I plan on reading 2666 after IJ.

http://codysbooks.proboards.com/index.cgi

Even David Foster Wallace in an interview with Charlie Rose said that his book is about stuff that most people would never talk about socially (and he referred to the televised interview itself as an example of a setting). I'm guessing you can talk about a lot of this socially if you really tried, but you'd have to be in a different cultural state of mind. Maybe high. Or just already in the momentum of talking about intimate things in a natural sounding way with someone. Or maybe it's just me putting too many qualifiers on what should or shouldn't be talked about.

I also think you couldn't possibly get into the kind of detail that we can get into here, without completely weighing things down in an in person conversation.

But still, I think there is hope for a compromise. This whole group reading event is awesome. I've been so jealous of all the Harry Potter/Twilight nuts who get to carry around their big thick books and squeal at each other about their reading adventures. The last time I got to do that was maybe in college... maybe. Also, because of the YA reading phenomenon, it is now more socially acceptable to read a big thick book and not be seen as pretentious, which is nice. Most reading of "pretentious" books is such an isolated experience.

Right now, I still get the occasional "oh yuck, footnotes," but I guess that's revenge for my own "Twilight sucks" or "not another Harry Potter book!" Actually I liked the first in movie form and the second I read through the second series completely except for the last book which I skimmed just for the good parts. But neither are satisfying like Infinite Jest, you know?

I love this opportunity as a way to connect, or shall I say interface, with fellow humans in another way. All of us coming together to pick apart this book and share our experiences with it is deeply inspiring. May I hope to always call a face, a map hereafter till death!

aye aye!

Given how much this book, and really the rest of his work, was about clawing our way back from social isolation and loneliness I think it is a fitting and touching tribute to the man that his book has brought so many of us together to talk about about these deeper places in the human experience. Whatever the opposite of rolling in your grave is, I hope we've got DFW doing it now.

I'm just trying to think what the opposite of spinning in one's grave would be...guffawing and clapping one's hands together as if one was a circus seal in one's grave? Doing sit-ups in one's grave? Laying back and fluffing one's pillow in one's grave? Doing a jig in one's grave? If anyone would like to do a series of illustrations of what DFW may now be doing in his grave if, indeed, we have pleased him, please post them online for I would very much like to see what that would look like and thank whatnot my religion does not forbid it.