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4.2 AVERAGE
4.2 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
funny
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
For the first several hundred pages, I did not enjoy Infinite Jest. My inner monologue went something like: "What is going on? This is boring. I don't care about tennis. Is this footnote ever going to end? I can't remember all of these names." And so on. But then, at some point, things started to click into place. I began to like the book more and more. By the end, I loved it. It took me two months to read it, and I already want to read it again- to really dig up its secrets.
Infinite Jest is unlike anything I've read before. It's difficult to connect with, but rewarding and intriguing once you do. The only other media that has given me a similar feeling is "Twin Peaks." While the subject matter is obviously quite different, both elicit feelings of confusion, frustration, and obsessive desire to figure out what in the hell is going on. Also, both compel me to stay up far too late reading theories on the internet.
Infinite Jest is unlike anything I've read before. It's difficult to connect with, but rewarding and intriguing once you do. The only other media that has given me a similar feeling is "Twin Peaks." While the subject matter is obviously quite different, both elicit feelings of confusion, frustration, and obsessive desire to figure out what in the hell is going on. Also, both compel me to stay up far too late reading theories on the internet.
challenging
dark
funny
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I guess the way he was he was going to tie it all up was he wasn’t. Fire.
Felt all sorts of things while reading, and some of the faces I made were gnarly. Contains moments that were difficult to keep reading through and others difficult to stop.
One of those things you finish and it’s like woah it’s over. The tide is way out.
Felt all sorts of things while reading, and some of the faces I made were gnarly. Contains moments that were difficult to keep reading through and others difficult to stop.
One of those things you finish and it’s like woah it’s over. The tide is way out.
challenging
funny
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
slow-paced
challenging
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
adventurous
challenging
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A long and difficult read made much easier by my Kindle’s footnote and dictionary functions. Not easy to sum up in a review. The structure sort of swirls around in space, getting finer and finer as separate storylines begin to intersect, time gets more obvious, and you are finally slammed long-form glimpses inside the heads of Hal and Gately before the story folds in on itself and ends. I won’t act like I have some perceptive academic analysis of this book, but I think it captures the lurking beast, a sort of tech-fused societal sickness, of the late 20th/early 21st century perfectly. A deep dive into the many things that hold humanity back from the “good”. Is “good” something attainable, or is it just a controlled, irrational suppression of desires and adherence to cliches? Does it exist at all? Strikes me as mostly about dependence, cycles of abuse, suicide, depression, sobriety, and not much about happiness, but still wicked funny and rewarding to read. Spot on and wholly relatable, and when not relatable, understandable.
During the home stretch I listened to a lot of drone—GY!BE and natural snow buildings, specifically. I've always been a fan of lengthy, repetitive music that takes its time iterating on a particular idea, and there's often a quality to drone where it anesthetizes me to its qualities, causing me to take its progressions for granted. I then find myself in a brief state of shock as it ends, having been ripped from the warm embrace of artistic intent and deposited somewhat unceremoniously back out into the real world. Often, I would just start the track/album over again from the beginning.
Infinite Jest differs from drone in that I never found myself at ease in my experience of it. The thesaurus-vomiting prose, divided timelines of internal monologue, dual-tracked conversation, and imposingly odd worldbuilding all frustrated me from start to finish. However, while reading this never became easy, I did eventually start to take the obstacles for granted. Reflecting on the experience has forced me to try and look again at all of DFW's idiosyncrasies with fresh eyes.
One stylistic element that never lost its initial charms was the inclusion of endnotes. More than anything, flipping forward every once in a while for commentary, cross-reference, or fictional citation made me feel less alone within the book. The simulation of some detached fellow observer of the book's events did much to break up the—at times excruciating—monotony while never detaching me from the book's immensely powerful emotional beats.
I entered this book slightly worried I would struggle to fully connect with the themes of addiction. I had an unhealthy relationship with marijuana for many years, but I never attended NA meetings and my eventual choice to stop smoking was an easy one to make and maintain. I'm sure some of the (hilarious) commentary on AA Culture would have worked even better had my experience addiction been more formalized, but the broader throughline of escape through excess rocked me to my core. I initially found the choice to end the novel on the exploration of a brand new character in Eugene Fackelmann baffling and frustrating, but he represents the apotheosis of the addicted subject: a man who knows he will die if he does not act and chooses to get high for days on end instead, voluntarily dooming himself. He is the inverse of Erdedy when we meet him in the book's first addiction-focused chapter. Erdedy has tightly controlled drug use that is just beginning to bleed over into his "real life," and he wields justifications and obfuscations that are uproariously elaborate. By the end, Fackelmann has nothing in life but his 'mountain,' and can only feebly bleat out "'s a fucking lie" in response to every attempt by others at breaking through.
I frontloaded this review with discussion of how this book was a laborious read. This is certainly true; It took me a month to finish even with several marathon sessions. Despite this, after frowning at the closing page for a couple of minutes I found myself almost compulsively turning back to the front cover and re-reading 30 pages.
Returning to the book's opening is obviously an intended response; the book places its final chronological scene right smack dab at the beginning. But I didn't stop there. I kept going for page after page, not wanting the experience of infinite jest to be over, not wanting to be with Gately in the freezing sand at low tide, hoping that by rewinding to the start I could get one more helping of Entertainment.
Infinite Jest differs from drone in that I never found myself at ease in my experience of it. The thesaurus-vomiting prose, divided timelines of internal monologue, dual-tracked conversation, and imposingly odd worldbuilding all frustrated me from start to finish. However, while reading this never became easy, I did eventually start to take the obstacles for granted. Reflecting on the experience has forced me to try and look again at all of DFW's idiosyncrasies with fresh eyes.
One stylistic element that never lost its initial charms was the inclusion of endnotes. More than anything, flipping forward every once in a while for commentary, cross-reference, or fictional citation made me feel less alone within the book. The simulation of some detached fellow observer of the book's events did much to break up the—at times excruciating—monotony while never detaching me from the book's immensely powerful emotional beats.
I entered this book slightly worried I would struggle to fully connect with the themes of addiction. I had an unhealthy relationship with marijuana for many years, but I never attended NA meetings and my eventual choice to stop smoking was an easy one to make and maintain. I'm sure some of the (hilarious) commentary on AA Culture would have worked even better had my experience addiction been more formalized, but the broader throughline of escape through excess rocked me to my core. I initially found the choice to end the novel on the exploration of a brand new character in Eugene Fackelmann baffling and frustrating, but he represents the apotheosis of the addicted subject: a man who knows he will die if he does not act and chooses to get high for days on end instead, voluntarily dooming himself. He is the inverse of Erdedy when we meet him in the book's first addiction-focused chapter. Erdedy has tightly controlled drug use that is just beginning to bleed over into his "real life," and he wields justifications and obfuscations that are uproariously elaborate. By the end, Fackelmann has nothing in life but his 'mountain,' and can only feebly bleat out "'s a fucking lie" in response to every attempt by others at breaking through.
I frontloaded this review with discussion of how this book was a laborious read. This is certainly true; It took me a month to finish even with several marathon sessions. Despite this, after frowning at the closing page for a couple of minutes I found myself almost compulsively turning back to the front cover and re-reading 30 pages.
Returning to the book's opening is obviously an intended response; the book places its final chronological scene right smack dab at the beginning. But I didn't stop there. I kept going for page after page, not wanting the experience of infinite jest to be over, not wanting to be with Gately in the freezing sand at low tide, hoping that by rewinding to the start I could get one more helping of Entertainment.