Book #14: Infinite Jest

Alright, so people have started to notice that I have not posted in a good long while. Hopefully this post will explain why, in part. The thing is, I have been very busy reading “Infinite Jest,” which is a book that has more than 1000 pages if you count the endnotes. Lots of people have been reading “Infinite Jest” this summer thanks to the online book group at Infinite Summer. Well, as you likely know, I can’t stand not having read a book that many other people had read, so I decided to join in. But I decided to make it even harder on myself—while the Infinite Summer readers were taking from June 21st to Sept. 22nd to read the book, I wanted to go a little faster. I made it my goal to read “Infinite Jest” in just one month: July 1 to July 31.

To do this, one has to read about 30 pages a day, and woe unto me if I skipped a day because of like, a social life, because then I was attempting to read 60 or so pages a day. And these aren’t the kinds of pages you read real fast; there’s a lot of contemplating and trying to figure out what’s going on. Now, I didn’t have to do it this way, but I wanted to, so I’ve been reading a lot and that’s part of why I haven’t been blogging lately.

Well, I’ll just go ahead and admit that I didn’t finish the book til last night, August 2, two days off the goal mark, but oh well. I’m still glad I read at the pace I did, because I think that if I hadn’t set aside such large chunks of time to read this book, I might have given up on this book like so many others do. But because I kept going at quite a clip, I think I got to a place of acceptance with it faster, and it became like this dedicated mental exercise time, when I sat down to read. A recent blogger at Infinite Summer likened it to yoga, and I completely agree.

And I ended up really loving it, and being absolutely in awe of how David Foster Wallace’s brain worked (and of course, at the same time, sad about how his brain worked, as he committed suicide last year and lots of the book deals with awful awful depression, but that’s not what I want to focus on). Some days, this book made me want to write my own book, and some days, I felt it was useless to even call myself a writer because what could I ever produce that would match this? It’s such a weird, funny, scary, heartbreaking world he created in this book. The plot is impossible to summarize, but it involves a tennis academy, alcohol and drug addiction, filmmaking, depression, alienation and Quebec separatists.

“Infinite Jest” seems like one of those books that people think they’re not smart enough to read, but all the intro posts to the book posted at Infinite Summer were a big help. Then it was nice to see what other people thought, but then, thanks to my advanced reading schedule, I zoomed ahead of everyone, and stopped checking the internet for what people thought. Then, last night, after I finished, I finally checked the internet again to see if my understanding of the book was remotely close to what I was “supposed” to think, and it seems like I did okay in terms of understanding everything, which is good, I guess, but I suppose that’s not the kind of thing you’re supposed to worry about, and the fact that I’m even giving myself the intellectual pat on the back now seems kind of weird. But I guess what I’m saying is that if you’ve ever been intimidated by the book, you shouldn’t be. The things you’re supposed to understand, you do, and the things that aren’t addressed or resolved, well, they’re good in their own way too. I think I’ll be re-reading passages in this book for days and months to come, if not re-reading it altogether, which is an impulse I very rarely have about a book; usually I consider re-reading to be a waste when there are so many other books to be read.

So that’s what I’ve been doing: reading a really really long book in a short timeframe. And if that’s not enough for you, I’ll show you something else I’ve been working on in the last few months. It’s a cross-stitch of Pope John Paul II!!!!!!

At the top you see what it will be one day, and at bottom you see where I am with it now. I have a headless pope. But this is what I like to do while I watch junky tv, when I wasn't reading Infinite Jest or at work or hanging out with people. So hopefully now all my time is accounted for. And as a warning---I'm going on vacation starting Friday where I will be blissfully internet-free, so hopefully this post can tide y'all over for awhile.