Infinite Summer 2015 discussion

It's June, and in seven days we'll be kicking off our official discussion of the first week's reading. If you haven't cracked the book open yet, now's the perfect time to start.

I thought it would be nice to learn a little more about each other, so please weigh in if you'd like to introduce yourself. I'll start:

My name is Sarah. I live in Seattle, work for a tech company (surprise!), and love movies, television, cloudy days, knitting, and, of course, reading. I have a husband and a cat and a baby on the way. Favorite non-DFW authors include Iain M. Banks, Nick Harkaway, Hugh Howey, Neal Stephenson, and Gregory Maguire. This is my second time through IJ.

So: hello and welcome, everyone! Can't wait to go on this journey together.

Hi Sarah. I'm Chad who works for a tech company in Canada (and will be traveling to Seattle tomorrow actually) and I have been meaning to do Infinite Summer for the past 3 years or so. So, I thank you for starting this group, and I look forward to leaning on you all for support as I finally read IJ.

Sarah's mom. I live in seattle with Sarah's dad. Love to read. Somehow missed IJ. Now's the time (or tome).

Hi,

I'm an American expat living in the southwest of France. I teach drawing and painting for adults.

I recently finished my second reading of IJ. I had so much fun I'm tempted to go immediately to reading three - which I suppose is where the "Infinite" comes into play...

Hi, I'm Diane! I live in Seattle and work as a software engineer for a coffee company. I have many hobbies but they are primarily cats, coffee, crime shows, and computers.

I came across this group through Sarah who I have the joy of knowing in person, but this journey really started back in 2009 when our friends tried an Infinite Summer before the ease of goodreads and Kindle. I'm hoping I succeed this time now that I am unburdened by the physical book. I also hope this jump starts a return to me reading fiction - a past time that was crushed by college.

Hey y'all,

I'm a sophomore at university in DC, studying international relations and creative writing. Aside from reading and writing, I spend a lot of my down time playing and listening to music and wandering around the woods near my school.

I was only recently turned onto DFW after reading Consider the Lobster a few months ago. I fell in love with his writing almost instantly and couldn't wait to jump into IJ, so I'm already about halfway through it. So far it's been quite the experience.

Hi, everyone - I'm Ian. I am a mental health professional living in Reno, NV, with my wife (who is also reading IJ this summer) and two ridiculous greyhounds. Favorite non-DFW authors include Vonnegut, Dostoevsky, Pynchon (although I've only read V.), Salinger, Melanie Klein, Rioch, Bion, Frankl, Camus, etc.

This is my second attempt at completing IJ (last time the dissertation thing got in the way around page 360), and my wife's first time through IJ. Very excited to share this experience with her, and with all of you.

We've started a small, personal blog to collect our thoughts, quotes, resources, interesting whatevers, etc. along the way: http://infinitereno.tumblr.com

Looking forward to sharing in this group experience!

Hello! I'm Diane from CA and if it weren't for this group I would have kept pushing IJ further to the back of my TBR just because of its size. I heard about this book through booktube and one person even claimed that it was his opinion that this book was the best book ever written so naturally I wanted to see what the hype was about. I am only on page 37.

Hi all. I'm a writer/journalist/translator/editor living in Berlin. I've read IJ before, but years ago, and the idea of having people to read it with again sounds delightful. I've found he can be a bit dangerous to the writing process -- his voice is so tremendously powerful and infectious that it has a tendency to slip unnoticed into my own work. I'd love to hear from other writing types about how they grapple with him as a voice and influence and literary milestone.

Other quick-to-mind favorites: Cortazar, Lessing, Woolf. Mantel, Robert Penn Warren, Cartarescu, Grass, Victor Serge... Jim Butcher. Le Guin. Chandler.

I'm in full agreement with Berlin John (OK to nickname?) that DFW causes all manner of problems when it comes to your own writing. I fully stopped any effort at writing for publication (which efforts were admittedly lacking in the industriousness such a goal demands) after finishing IJ the first time. I suffered different manifestations of "What's the point when something like THIS exists? What is there left to say that's worth someone else's time that DFW hasn't already rendered in better prose than I could ever produce?" that ranged from trying to write like him to the catatonic state I imagine would accompany taking a syringe full of ennui to the temple. Everything after IJ was just words lined up behind a punctuation mark. To those who find themselves similarly afflicted, this passes with time, but IJ seems to always live in its own category.

I caveat all my future posts as follows: I’ve read this book many times, I’ve read about this book, and I’ve read writings about writings about this book. Anything I post is nearly guaranteed to have influences from those sources and so I don’t take much credit for the thoughts I’ll contribute.


Home is North Dakota. When it’s not IJ, my dependable go-tos are N. Gaiman, I McEwan, and H. Murakami.

Hi everyone. Lisa - live in San Francisco. Have read IJ before and thought it would be fun to read again years later with the group. I work at an investment firm and have spent many years volunteering at literary organizations. Nice to meet you all!

Hi My name is Mekki. I am a Systems Engineer from New York. I started reading IJ last year and I got about 20% before i put it on hold due to my workload. I like books that force me to become a detective or mashup different Genres.

My aim is to conquer this read and have a good discussion.

Nice to meet you guys

Welcome, everyone! Glad (ha) to meet you all.

Hello! I'm Charlene, currently living in Sheffield (UK), studying a part-time PhD and working within clinical trials research.

I'm so glad I found this group as I just bought IJ yesterday whilst waiting on a train in London, and read the first few chapters on the journey home. It's been on my to-read list for what feels like forever, so I'm excited to get started! I will honestly read anything I can get my hands on, but I'm trying to invest more time in the sort of books that stick with you long after the ending; stories that challenge your way of thinking and make you want to grab a pen and start frantically underlining intriguing words/ideas/references.

I have a feeling I'm really going to enjoy this book :)

Hi, welcome, Charlene!!

I'm Bronwyn, and I live in Seattle and work for a big tech company. This will be my second time through IJ, and I'm very excited to read it again. Especially at a slower pace than the 4 day, gin-fueled binge that was my first run.

Although, as I was unpacking my books and agonizing over the appropriate organizational scheme for my new place, I began to suspect that my copy of IJ has wandered off somewhere. Oh well... I will have a fresh copy to mark up.

Other authors: Woolf and Ondaatje and McEwan and Mitchell and generally I like the Booker long list. But I also read a lot of sci fi/fantasy, so Iain (M) Banks, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Jacqueline Carey, N. K. Jemisin.... Etc.

Oh, and rereading Sarah's post, Nick Harkaway snuck in last year as one of my new favorite authors :)

Hi, Bronwyn! Welcome!! Looks like we're in the same general area, and I live in Auburn, Wa. Pretty cool, eh? Anyway, that's CRAZY that you binge-read IJ in just four days!!!!:)

Hello, My name's John. I dig DFW. I teach English/writing, and yes I've even pushed the essay "Consider the Lobster" on my students (for the most part, they hate it....tsk tsk). I read lots of pop horror, but I'll bounce around to whatever grabs me. I attempted Infinite Summer last year, and made it about 20% before son #2 was born and free time disappeared.

I'm reading IJ on the Kindle -- it's nice for the footnotes, but I don't have the luxury of the timeline bookmark. So 5 minutes ago I wrote out the timeline on a little notepad I keep by my desk.

Nice to meet everyone. Cheers!

Hey all

My name's Griffin and I live in LA working in the behavioral health field. I finished Infinite Jest for the first time last year and it really affected me, so I wanted to read through it again. I've read a little bit of Wallace's other stuff (The Pale King, Oblivion), but thus far Infinite Jest and Good Old Neon are my favorite. Aside from IJ, some of my favorite books are East of Eden, Slaughterhouse Five, and any CS Lewis books.

Because reading Infinite Jest is such an intimidating undertaking, my love for it has always been a lonely one :'( but now this group is here and everything is groovy! My fiancé is also going to be reading with us, and I'm as excited as Erdedy for the Bob Hope dealer's arrival. Thanks Sarah for putting this together!

Griffin wrote: " I'm as excited as Erdedy for the Bob Hope dealer's arrival"

Haha! :) Welcome Griffin!

Hi all,
I'm Ashley- I live in Seattle and work at a tech company. I've never read this book before and I feel like I'm moving slow but I'm getting into it. This has always been an intimidating read in my opinion, so I'm psyched to be making progress.

Also I'm getting foot surgery in a week so I'm banking on lots of reading this summer since I won't be as active as I'd like. I'm reading on my kindle. I live with my cat and boyfriend, neither of which are joining this Infinite Jest quest (jerks, obviously). And I recently read station eleven and absolutely loved it.

Big high fives to Sarah for making this happen!

Big high fives to Ashley, and nice to meet you Griffin!

I recently read Station Eleven too. excellent and fun read! Recommended.

Hey, everybody. My name is Dustin, and I live in rural northeast Georgia. My bachelors is in Philosophy & Religion, and I will be moving to Ames, Iowa in a little over a month to pursue graduate studies in Community and Regional Planning.

This will be my first time reading through Infinite Jest. I have read several of DFW's essays and watched many interviews, and reading his work does this really crazy and chaotic yet enjoyable thing to my brain. I love it, and I'm happy to have people to discuss all of this with!

Other authors I like: Dostoevsky (I think he's probably my favorite), Faulkner, O'Connor, Garcia Marquez, McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and others. Also introducing myself to Don DeLillo sometime this year.

Nice to meet everyone.

I'm Bev, an anthropologist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. This will be my first time with an on line book group and I am looking forward to it. I love post modern lit--John Barth is my favorite--but have never read IJ before. Just finished reading the Cambridge Intro to Postmodern Fiction and according to the author, Infinite Jest is THE book. Am a few chapters behind so will be catching up in the next few days.

Hi all. My name is Robert - I live in Brooklyn, NY and I'm a graphic designer. This is my first time reading Infinite Jest, actually this the first thing I've ever read by DFW. I love a good challenging book and I've been interested in tackling this book for awhile, so I'm happy to be here reading it with you all! Being part of the group is a nice support system for when it gets tough.

The last three books I read were non-fiction, so I'm excited to be jumping into an enormous fictional work.

Nice to meet you all!

Hi!

I'm Leslie, and I live in Montana where I work in mental health. This is my second read of Infinite Jest -- I read it for the first time in 2009 and loved it. I am a little behind, but excited to see what it's like to read the book again. Among other things, I'm a big fan of: David Foster Wallace and his incredible vocabulary, humor, and familiarity with the darker corners of the human psyche; ambiguous works of art (like Infinite Jest) that require me to employ my negative capability skills; and epic journeys (like long treks or 1,000+-page books).

This is my first time in an online book group, and I'm looking forward to a community of Infinite Jest readers!

Whew! I have started IJ (again!) and am glad to have a group to discuss

I live in Florida and work as a school librarian. I love DFW and have had this book on my shelf for a long time.

Hi! I *just* got my copy, so joining late, but trying to catch up a bit. Thanks for this group! I've added a fourth bookmark to the method, so that at every weekly break point I can go read all of your analyses and comments.

What a great book!

Hey all,

Man, can't tell you how much I fancy finally finding fellow Foster fans!

I'm 19, and it brings me great pain to say that I pushed off reading Infinite Jest from the moment I learned DFW had written a 1079-paged book, couldn't bring myself to read it because I knew doing so would mean that I'd eventually come to page 1079 and would then, on that fateful day, have to -*cringe*- stop reading it. It's been a grueling half-year since I learned of the book -- the image of Infinite Jest's cover constantly swimming in my head, daunting me -- and I've finally come to realize that this logic is ridiculous, that technically I need not read the last page 'til my death day; therefore, I'll never really have to finish Infinite Jest in my lifetime. What a marvelous idea, eh?

Yeah, I know, not really.

(Wow, clearly all this time (around 22/7) with David Foster Wallace has gotten me confused as to how long sentences are supposed to be. Yikes, this was cringe-worthy.) :)

I'm an art teacher from Dallas.
I know I am late to the party! I'll read comments up to where I am but I can't possibly get to page 500 anytime soon!

Tara wrote: "(Wow, clearly all this time (around 22/7) with David Foster Wallace has gotten me confused as to how long sentences are supposed to be. Yikes, this was cringe-worthy.) :)
"

haha :-) Same here. I've been emailing about the book with a friend and our emails got very hard to read. Inception of parentheses (Just cause it's easier than using footnotes ;-) )

I can't believe it has been more than a year since I joined to read the book and I never finished. I think I stopped in the 200s or 300s........I hate how time flies just like that. Let's see if I pick it up again b4 next year.