So what's the deal with Infinite Jest? (genuinely curious--I've never read it, and I don't know anyone who has, and I've only ever heard of this book in the context of a meme)
It's one of the longest books ever written and takes about 300 pages to get good. It's famously bought and never finished or even started. It's a complicated book about Tennis, drug use, quebec separatists, imperialism, words, grammar and disabled cross dressers with science fiction elements (the world is basically depicted as post-disaster capitalist hell where various companies bid to name the year after themselves "the year of the chewable ambient tab" for example, which everyone uses instead of numbers) and over 400 pages of footnotes that explain the world but make the book even longer. It also doesn't really end, it just... stops - which people have defended as a deliberate choice of postmodernism but David Foster Wallace 's agent and his editor have both said that it ends like that because they literally took it off him in order to publish it and not because it was actually finished.
Basically it's the book every pretentious douchebag you or your girlfriend fucked in college had on their nightstand to try and look clever.
I quite enjoyed it but 99% of people who have read it are insufferable about having read it.
I really only start talking about it after somebody else brings it up, mostly because of the stigma around a white dude bringing up Infinite Jest. Which really sucks because it's a pretty interesting book with a lot of unique perspective on things that are happening today, like entertainment addiction.
So what's the deal with Infinite Jest? (genuinely curious--I've never read it, and I don't know anyone who has, and I've only ever heard of this book in the context of a meme)
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It's one of the longest books ever written and takes about 300 pages to get good. It's famously bought and never finished or even started. It's a complicated book about Tennis, drug use, quebec separatists, imperialism, words, grammar and disabled cross dressers with science fiction elements (the world is basically depicted as post-disaster capitalist hell where various companies bid to name the year after themselves "the year of the chewable ambient tab" for example, which everyone uses instead of numbers) and over 400 pages of footnotes that explain the world but make the book even longer. It also doesn't really end, it just... stops - which people have defended as a deliberate choice of postmodernism but David Foster Wallace 's agent and his editor have both said that it ends like that because they literally took it off him in order to publish it and not because it was actually finished.
Basically it's the book every pretentious douchebag you or your girlfriend fucked in college had on their nightstand to try and look clever.
I quite enjoyed it but 99% of people who have read it are insufferable about having read it.
I think it only seems that way because a lot of people who read it don't really bring it up much.
That's a very good point. I don't think I've ever brought it up in conversation except when someone in my family was reading it.
I guess it's like idiots and Nietzche. Gotta let everyone know you read it.
I really only start talking about it after somebody else brings it up, mostly because of the stigma around a white dude bringing up Infinite Jest. Which really sucks because it's a pretty interesting book with a lot of unique perspective on things that are happening today, like entertainment addiction.
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