Infinite Summer Wants to Help You Help Yourself

Buy it today online or in store. Take it home, crack it open and read 10.8¹ pages. Do that each day for about 75 pages total this week. Continue each week until September 22nd. Ta-da, you just finished “Infinite Jest”² and it wasn’t even that hard, at least according to the people at infinitesummer.org. These “endurance bibliophiles”³ have it all mapped out for you with guides, charts and schedules. I think this is a good idea. I eschewed any kind of schedule when I started “Infinite Jest” in the summer of 2005⁴ and didn’t completely finish it for four years, getting about halfway that summer then returning now and then for fifty page bursts. At the time I finally finished it, a co-worker of mine bought a copy and speed-read it in I believe eight days. Plenty has been written about Wallace’s mammoth text, so I’ll only say that it is deservedly recommended. There are problems with it to be sure, but so much to admire. Unlike some of the other famously difficult books⁵, “Infinite Jest” is not really that hard to read on a page-by-page basis (the dialect-heavy segments around page 40 aside). It is simply long. The fact that the book’s chapters jump through time, place and characters can, ironically, trick you into thinking that you can jump back into the book anytime. And probably you can, but “Infinite Jest” is a book you should already have read by now, so get on it already⁶!

1. Including endnotes^a.
a. Yes, all of them.
2. David Foster Wallace. 1996. Little, Brown and Company.
3. Kind of sounds like the lamest event on Fear Factor, doesn’t it?
4. Probably didn’t help that I also tried to start Gravity’s Rainbow^a at the same
time^b.
a. Should I admit publicly that this still sits on my shelf with the bookmark only 1/4th of the way through?
b. Like^b1 literally.
b1. One thing I remember from Infinite Jest is how odd Wallace’s use of the word “like” felt, but then I started reflexively using it in a similar way.
5. “Gravity’s Rainbow” perhaps?
6. Apologies for all these endnotes. It just kind of feels like the thing to do when talking about the Jest.