you're right, there are enough competing ideas of exactly what constitutes irony that i should a) try to avoid conflating postmodern and ironic, and b) try to work out exactly what DFW means by it.

Can I tackle this book with a dictionary or do I need some kind of super brain?

You just need two tools I lack right now. Time, and a rudimentary amount of focus.

I would listen to it at work while driving but they didn't record the endnotes for the audiobook.

god forbid you do the audiobook of IJ. Plz no.

they HAVE an audiobook for IJ how frickin long is that thing? also, like it's been said before itt, the endnotes are absolutely crucial.

i'm finishing this tonight imo.

Plz explain ?

infinite jizz would make a good adult film. still no sign of the amazon delivery. arab crooks.

Le Culte du Prochain Train > Eschaton, imo

Lonely, I've read a lot of books in my day, and I honestly don't think this book is worth the trouble. I don't think it's worth even 10% of the trouble.

I would recommend that you try reading 2 novels by Jonathan Franzen instead: The Corrections and Freedom. Wallace and Franzen were friends and contemporaries. Franzen's novels are readable. And no ****ing footnotes.

Thanks for the heads up, kioshk. Maybe Infinite Jest was written as a joke on people who read it.

I LOVED Freedom. Corrections is on my short list. This is good short reading too.

Anyone who doesn't think DFW is 'readable' is flat out trolling.

Just read 'Girl with Curious Hair' collection, and if it's not your thing, then nvm IJ.

I think he meant compared to IJ, not Wallace.

Sometimes people can have different opinions about things without any "trolling" being involved, as shocking as they may seem to some.

I do like most of Wallace's essays.

Wait, are you trolling me right now?

This must be an uber-level troll. Nice work!

Gotta say, I'm mostly reading it for the sake of finishing it, now. I'm at, like, 70% on the kindle (the main text ends in the 80%s, I'm at 98% when reading footnotes), and I've largely fallen out of love with it. It's odd, because I really like two of the three major threads of the book - the tennis and the drugs - but the pacing seems all wrong. Whilst it's entertaining enough, nothing of any note has happened for like 300 pages. That's a book, right there.

I gotta be honest, I have *no idea* what people mean when they say things like 'Nothing happened for x00 pages' in any book.

You could say the same thing about the entire last half of Lolita [save one quick scene.] People I consider smart, well-educated say this about various Great Novels that I've enjoyed and I just....it's like they are speaking Gaelic, it doesn't register at all with me. A Fan's Notes, same thing.

It's not Stephen King. It's not Hardy boys. It's not Robert Howard. It's not Agatha Christie. Many things happened on those pages. It's not a plot-driven novel, as you obviously have noticed by now.

I mean, you could say he's too verbose, too difficult for today's reader, too post-modern, trying to hard to be clever, any number of criticisms, but...that one I do not grok.

I dunno, it seems to me that the book as a whole has much more of an overall narrative direction than other really big books that i've read recently - 2666, Against the Day, Life and Fate being the three that spring to mind. Perversely, having a sense of where the book is going but not having it going there seems to make me feel the weight of the 1000 pages much more than in these other books where stuff just happens with no obvious direction to it.

To be a bit more specific:

Okay, I hear you there. Noted and a logical complaint.

But like you said, if we decide to go with it is/part of the callback to the opening...where else would it go?

I did feel there was plenty of drug discussion at the Academy so maybe he felt even more would be too much? Maybe it was in the 200 or so pages that got cut...

I really loved ETA and the Halfway House. I even loved the pun/injoke about calling the tennis academy ETA.

I finished it now, and I fell back in love with it as it came to an end. I'm not about to flip the book over and start again from page 1 (hello self reference!), which I guess I'd really need to do to really get under the skin, but I'm definitely glad I did read it.

I re-read it like ~14 years later [the whole thing I mean, not just bits and pieces.]

Prob re-read it in another 5-6 years this time.