i listened to it as an audiobook twice back in 2010-2012 (56 hours). It doesn't contain the footnotes, however the cited numbers come up in the audiobook. I read some of the footnotes, but not all of them. It's interesting.

Pros (imo)

Lots of cool worldbuilding that is hampered by DFW's gen X "apolitical" schtick. It shows a different neoliberal hellscape than the one we got. Like a 2010s America where 9/11 never happened. Wallace "predicts" things resembling instagram filters, smartphones, something resembling North American EU called "ONAN" where America, Mexico, and Canada become a neoliberal superstate. Canada and America are on the brink of war because of Quebecois separatists. There is an annexed region of canada that americans use to catapult their garbage into. New creatures evolve there. A germophobic lounge singer is elected president and invents a policy called "subsidized time" where corporations purchase the entire calendar year from the federal government and uses it to advertise in a quasi-Chinese-astrological way (Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, etc.). Part of the mystery of the book is solving what orders the years are in so you can figure out what happened when. Dates are presented as belonging to subsidized years, instead of being given numbers like 2011, etc.

Cons (imo) (general CW)

There are some trans characters who are presented in let's say a very dated way unfortunately. There's grotesquery that doesn't really serve the story. Flippant use of slurs, cheesy "written by a white guy" patois for working class black characters (Wardine Be Cry), descriptions of violence and sexual assault and rare diseases that get so gruesome without really moving the "plot" forward. There's no plot because it's purely literary.

some extra details.

I'd say there are two people who are close to approaching being the main character. Don Gately, and Hal Incandenza. Gately is a reformed drug addict and criminal in his 20s. Hal is a bourgeois tennis kid who is succumbing to drug addiction in his late teens. There are two main settings. ETA, a bourgeois tennis academy, and Ennet House Rehab, downhill from ETA. The stories of the bougie kids at the tennis academy is symbolically contrasted with the characters at the rehab center. There is overlap. There is a lot of focus on addiction. A psychological weapon that threatens to kill thousands of people is unleashed by the headmaster of ETA, a man who commits suicide by sticking his head in a microwave. The psychological weapon is a film so addictive, anyone who sees it cannot stop watching it. They neglect all bodily needs, etc until they die. The film is stored on a SD-like cartridge.