beatsbybeard 's review for:

Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace

4.0

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As always, DFW’s obsession with and adoration for words make reading him both an endurance and a joy. I tend to like his nonfiction more than his novels, especially when he writes about things unrelated to language (e.g. tennis, lobsters, Terminator 2). He does retain some amount of stick-up-his-ass elitism (especially re: cultural taste and grammar usage), but what a shame it is that he ended his own life before the U.S. made his most pessimistic predictions real. Reading him always reminds me to take language more seriously whether I’m consuming or producing, and I’m grateful for that.