read Infinite Jest

Note to those who may be stuck somewhere in the middle (or the beginning) and looking for the encouragement they need to carry on: finishing this book will bring you no closure whatsoever. There is no magical coming-together that sets up sparklers behind your eyes and makes the whole hundred-hour undertaking seem meaningful. I finished this book while sitting in Physics and had to jump up and take a long walk around the baseball field, both to work off the adrenaline that built up as the weight in my left hand decreased, and to keep from yodeling in despair and frustration. This book gave me insight into the human condition, alright: a sense of the futility of all grand endeavors, and the uselessness of literature as a whole.
Goddammit, David Foster Wallace. I’m going to spend the next seventy-odd years plotting what I’ll do if I ever run into you in heaven- or, more likely, hell.

Oh boy, this again… I got stalled out at around 500 pages, but now I’m being shamed into taking up this behemoth and finishing it off. If I can handle Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow, I can handle David Foster Wallace- or that’s what people keep telling me, anyway.

goal for the summer: finish it. I’m nearly 100 pages in. DFW is such a genius.

It might be the delirium talking, but I’ve been home sick for two days, and, having slogged through another hundred pages of Infinite Jest, I’ve come to the sudden, inexplicably delayed realization that this book is really, really boring.
It’s not that I’m not intelligent enough to appreciate its charms, or that I’m not putting in enough effort. It’s just that there is nothing about the book that appeals to me. If there’s one thing I can pinpoint as something I look for in a novel, it’s conciseness and intricacy and above all elegance; while this book is certainly complex, it’s complex not in the way of origami or flowers, but in the way of ancient wiring- the kind that makes a master electrician throw up his hands in despair and reach for the wire cutters. It’s just a mess. A intellectual mess, sure- but a mess nonetheless, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
Of course, I can’t very well stop reading now… I’m on page 452.

Looking back at my last entry on this goal, I have to say that The Doc of the past was a little over-ambitious. After today (which was supposed to be a day spent reading, but wasn’t), I am now 211 pages into Infinite Jest, and it is still challenging at times, but I think I’m getting into the flow a little more. There are some bits that are nearly painful to read, but other sections that flow and really work for me. So 211 pages in (plus a handful of pages of footnotes) means I’m roughly 20% done. That’s not terrible progress, actually. The real challenge will be to see if I pick it up again some time this week…

I’ve had this book for longer than I can remember, and I haven’t read more than a hundred pages of it. At the beginning, it was a bit of a challenge; now it seems like an impossible slog. It’s not because it’s too long, because I’ve gone through The Count of Monte Cristo, which is even longer and it’s one of my favourite books. It’s just that it has generated more psychic mass the longer it’s stayed, unread, on my bookshelf. If you could project my mental representation of this book onto a wall, it would be twenty feet tall with muscly arms and, somehow, fangs. I’ve started reading it, and it’s not bad, but I just hate opening it up. It feels like it takes a great deal of effort just to open the front cover every time.

But I’ve started and I’m 23 pages in, and I hope to try and do a minimum of 10 pages a day, which would mean it would take me until about September to finish. So I guess I’ll check back in September? Hopefully before then, hopefully not later.

I’m fifteen and the thickest book I’ve ever read is the fifth Harry Potter book. I used to be a huge reader but I kind of fell out of it in middle school.
Then I tumbled upon this and I am DETERMINED to finish it! Even if I do have to read every sentence three times and summarize the chapters to keep up with what’s going on.
Surprisingly, I’m really into it so far and I’m actually really excited to get farther into the story.

I just got it today and I’m twenty-two pages in so I guess about 978 more to go. :P

Giving up for now.

This mammoth book feels like a burden, or a curse. Possibly both. It is too large for me at this point in time to fully appreciate everything within it. I am only 17 so I have plenty of time to grow so that I can one day fully appreciate its monstrosity.

Wow…in the last 30 pages this book had a massive turnaround and has just become incredibly enjoyable. If it weren’t for the IPT assignment and the ironing I have to do, I’d probably just sit down and read all day today.

started on Thursday and I’m up to page 120 or so. This book is quite hard to read, even harder than Anna Karenina was. Though it’s pretty good so far…hmmmm…I might finish in about four weeks or so…
lol