Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace discussion

Glad to have you all aboard!

'ello all! I'll probably reread this with you guys. I've been dying to ever since I finished the book in March.

I may not actually reread the book, but how can I pass up being in on the discussion with this group?! Thanks for the invitation.

this group?
is that like you people?

Steve wrote: "I may not actually reread the book, but how can I pass up being in on the discussion with this group?! Thanks for the invitation."

Ohhh you're one of those people just like to watch. Kinky.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to the book and the the discussion. Immersion In the Infinite...

Jason wrote: "this group?
is that like you people?"

Funny how the tone you have in your head when you write something is what you assume everyone will hear when they read it. Fortunately, Jason got it just right.

Could I ask to be put into BB's camp, that of lover of the book cheerleading others to have a similar experience? That seems more noble than the Chauncey Gardner tag Mary wants to apply.

Hi y'all - thanks for the invite!

Thanks for the invite. I'm trepidatious about starting this book, but I guess I've got 5 months to pump myself up for it!

Terry wrote: "Thanks for the invite. I'm trepidatious about starting this book, but I guess I've got 5 months to pump myself up for it!"

I've been intimidated forever, but strength in numbers!

I think it's ideal to have a combination of people reading IJ for the first time and people who have already read it and are re-reading or just exploring the book with us. And what better group of people to read with?

And Kris will have read it six times by January! ;-p

I could still be working my way through all the translations of The Master and Margarita at that time. :)

Haha yes

Kris, thanks for the invite! IJ has been on my TBR pile for far too long (count me among the intrigued but intimidated). I'm looking forward to savoring this with you all during the long, not-as-cold-as-they-used-to-be days of winter.

Mary wrote: "Kris, thanks for the invite! IJ has been on my TBR pile for far too long (count me among the intrigued but intimidated). I'm looking forward to savoring this with you all during the long, not-as-co..."

Thanks for joining us, Mary! It will be great to have you along.

Thanks for the invite! i have been thinking of reading this book for years. Instead i have read friends' reviews of it. and friends' discussions of it. anyway, I'll do my best to keep up. i think i might need the (im)moral support of kinky watchers and cheerleaders.

Marieke wrote: "Thanks for the invite! i have been thinking of reading this book for years. Instead i have read friends' reviews of it. and friends' discussions of it. anyway, I'll do my best to keep up. i think i..."

I'm so glad you joined!

Kris wrote: "I could still be working my way through all the translations of The Master and Margarita at that time. :)"
Infinite Margarita? (My B&O copy arrived the other day! And I thought my senior year of college would be the last time I'd be excited about September's arrival.)

I looooove that we're getting a healthy mix of veteran readers and IJ virgins. That should be great for perspective and questions. You were right, Kris -- I'm already pretty excited about the group of folks this is attracting. I anticipate good times. :)

i'm an IJ virgin, but not a DFW virgin. i'm excited but nervous, in part out of concern for my sanity because a couple of days ago i also accepted an invite to a Proust 2013 group. but i noticed i'm not alone in that madness, Kris. :D

Cheryl wrote: "Thanks so much for the invite...it made my day!"

Thanks for accepting it, Cheryl! It's great to see you here. :)

Marieke wrote: "i'm an IJ virgin, but not a DFW virgin. i'm excited but nervous, in part out of concern for my sanity because a couple of days ago i also accepted an invite to a Proust 2013 group. but i noticed i'..."

Oh yes, Marieke, I am just as mad as you are in that regard, and probably worse. We can go happily crazy together. :)

Let's have a contest! Haha!

I think for my 2013 GR Reading Challenge I will say my goal is 8 books.

I forgot to say: I'm glad, because I was feeling a little embarrassed.

Marieke wrote: "Let's have a contest! Haha!

I think for my 2013 GR Reading Challenge I will say my goal is 8 books."

That's great. Laughing here. :)

Might be useful to re-read IJ again now that I've absorbed most of the DFW canon. I'll probably benefit from having the DFW voice fully installed in my cranium for the re-read.

yessss, MJ is here!

Mary wrote: "I've been intimidated forever, but strength in numbers!"

Exactly. Let's kick this book's ass.

Wonderful group. Thanks for the invite!

Thanks for the invitation Kris. I've recently finished IJ. In the ongoing effort to improve my own writing I had decided a second reading of IJ will allow me to study DFW's sentence structures more closely, and, of course, see things unseen, which will be wildly fun with this readers group.

Thanks so much for joining, Chance, Traveller, and MJ! As a (relatively) soon to be first-time reader of IJ, I am very glad to see so many IJ veterans joining the group. And I can tell there will be a lot of humor and fun along the way. Good for morale!

Rod wrote: "Mary wrote: "I've been intimidated forever, but strength in numbers!"

Exactly. Let's kick this book's ass."

Rod, you're in charge of group pep-talks. :)

My thought about IJ and its difficulty is that it is really more time consuming than anything else. Obviously if you're going to try to speed read the book, then it's going to prove quite difficult. But otherwise, nothing in the book is horribly difficult to understand. The most "difficult" parts have to do with tiny font spread across multiple pages in single paragraphs and the endnotes, which are in even smaller font that go for many pages themselves. The words in IJ taken as they are, the difficulty doesn't touch Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow.

Kris wrote: "I could still be working my way through all the translations of The Master and Margarita at that time. :)"

Now THAT is a great goal.

Marieke wrote: "i'm an IJ virgin, but not a DFW virgin. i'm excited but nervous, in part out of concern for my sanity because a couple of days ago i also accepted an invite to a Proust 2013 group"

I'm in the Proust group too! Boy, yeah, I think 2013 will be the year I read about ten books. If I'm lucky.

Moira wrote: "I'm in the Proust group too! Boy, yeah, I think 2013 will be the year I read about ten books. If I'm lucky. "

Yes, you, Marieke and I will have 8 - 10 books down as our GR 2013 challenge. :)

Re. where the challenge comes in reading IJ - thanks so much, Stephen M. and Ali, for your perspective. Given that, I think when we get closer to the time, it could be helpful to get some scheduling and structural advice from IJ veterans on how to pace the reading and what combination of threads could make the most sense for good discussion without people worrying a lot about spoilers when they read. This is all the more important with the Proust 2013 read launching at the same time.

Stephen M wrote: "My thought about IJ and its difficulty is that it is really more time consuming than anything else. Obviously if you're going to try to speed read the book, then it's going to prove quite difficult..."


I'm a reader in training - working my way to Ulysses and GR. Skippy Dies helped with appreciation of Infinite Jest, so I'm hoping IJ helps with Ulysses and GR.

Bird Brian wrote: "Actually, I have the companion book, Elegant Complexity. I may use this group as an opportunity to go through that. "

One thing that might help - the Proust group has a topic for "auxiliary readings," and since there are I think a couple of book-length analyses of IJ now, plus books on DFW and the like, that could be something to do here? (Esp since a biography of DFW will be coming out next month, I think.)


There's also some nice online resources (this is in no way definitive, there is a LOT out there - just stuff I like):

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/ The one-stop "everything DFW" site. Lots of great essays, uncollected DFW, the latest news.

http://infinitesummer.org/archives/215 A v good how-to guide from the Infinite Summer group.

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/... For people who've read it before: how to read it in chronological order.

http://kottke.org/09/07/how-to-read-i... This isn't as good a guide to how-to IJ but it has one piece of invaluable advice....

....you should use the three bookmark method. One bookmark for where you are in the main text, another for your current footnote location, and a third for page 223, which lists the years covered by the novel in chonological order, from the Year of the Whopper (which corresponds to 2002) to the Year of Glad (2010).

Yes. USE A BOOKMARK. USE SEVERAL BOOKMARKS. One guy came up with a super-neat bookmark that lets you track your place in both the text and the footnotes. http://infinitesummer.org/forums/view... Someone else came up with a bookmark that doubles as a list of 'chapter thumbnails.' http://russillosm.com/ij.html

http://russillosm.com/ijndx.html There is also an index. Yes, you will want to use this.

http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/d... The wiki. Yes, there is a wiki. Do not try to read through it all at once, it will explode your brain. But it's helpful to have if you just can't find one specific detail. There's a spoiler-free way to look at it, too. It also has word definitions, a character diagram, page-by-page annotations, and other neat stuff.

http://ask.metafilter.com/133828/How-... Some pretty good suggestions.

Kris wrote: "Rod, you're in charge of group pep-talks. :)"

What we need is a drill instructor. "Look at this group they gave me! You all make me sick! You pansies look like you couldn't handle 'Horton Hears a Who', and you expect to tackle an intricate postmodern doorstop like'Infinite Jest'?! You're all worthless and weak! Now drop and give me fifty (pages)!"

Moira wrote: "Bird Brian wrote: "Actually, I have the companion book, Elegant Complexity. I may use this group as an opportunity to go through that. "

One thing that might help - the Proust group has a topic fo..."

Just added a new Resources thread, Moira -- http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9... Could you cut and paste message 41 into it? That would get the thread off to a great start!

Rod wrote: "Kris wrote: "Rod, you're in charge of group pep-talks. :)"

What we need is a drill instructor. "Look at this group they gave me! You all make me sick! You pansies look like you couldn't handle ..."

OK, maybe you're in charge of group discipline rather than morale. :)

Stephen M wrote: "But otherwise, nothing in the book is horribly difficult to understand. The most "difficult" parts have to do with tiny font spread across multiple pages in single paragraphs and the endnotes"

Hmmm, I don't think the difficulty is either that it's long, or that there are endnotes -- there's a lot of chronological hopping back and forth and the reader is required to mentally keep track of a lot of characters and plotlines. It reminded me of the first time I read Tolstoy (I wound up writing a list of the characters' names, including ALL their nicknames, on the inside back cover of my copy of Resurrection). And it's not Joyce, no, but in my opinion DFW uses quite a few words most readers won't know (I didn't know a lot of them, and my vocabulary's....pretty good).

As the Infinite Summer guide says

Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going, subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.

Stephen M wrote: "My thought about IJ and its difficulty is that it is really more time consuming than anything else. Obviously if you're going to try to speed read the book, then it's going to prove quite difficult..."

That's good to know. I read through GR on my first try without too much difficulty, but I did take my time and reread passages that I didn't absorb fully at first, and stopped and consulted online wikis when I lost track of the significance of a particular character or forgot what their relationship was to another character. I didn't get too studious about it, though, I mostly just tried to enjoy the ride. It took me three weeks to read it, but that was back before I had a kid and I actually had leisure time to read.

How much time do we have to read IJ? I may start early once I get some of top books on my to-read list out of the way, because I'm kind of a slow reader.

Very helpful perspective, Moira. It sounds like a combination of faith, attentive reading, use of resources to help remember characters, etc. when memory fails, and patience is required.

Kris wrote: "Rod wrote: "Kris wrote: "Rod, you're in charge of group pep-talks. :)"

I didn't mean me. Someone who's already read it. You don't send a bunch of grunts out into the field with a platoon leader who has no combat experience.

Kris wrote: "Just added a new Resources thread, Moira -- http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9... Could you cut and paste message 41 into it? That would get the thread off to a great start! "

I will do that, w00t!

Moira wrote: "Kris wrote: "Just added a new Resources thread, Moira -- http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/9... Could you cut and paste message 41 into it? That would get the thread off to a great start! "

I wi..."

Thanks! I would do it, but since you put together all the links and info, I wanted that to be clear. :)

Kris wrote: "Very helpful perspective, Moira. It sounds like a combination of faith, attentive reading, use of resources to help remember characters, etc. when memory fails, and patience is required."

I gotta admit, a lot of my friends had raved about it, but I had sort of consistently glanced at it and thought "Not for me," until a while later just after I'd sobered up in 2002 a friend in AA told me after a meeting about the Crocodiles ("The Crocodiles talk about how they can't count the number of guys that've Come In for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and died, or not gotten to die...."). I had no idea there was anything about addiction in the book, I just thought it was some kind of pomo thing (I know, I know; I think I was originally really put off by the Year of the Glad Diaper Whatever). I was sort of clutching at anything and everything in very early sobriety, so I powered through it (I admit, freely skimming over some of the non-addiction stuff). So that was my personal hook that got me through the book when my attention flagged. I think without something like that, it can be a lot harder to read.


(DFW is dead-bang on about the Crocodiles, as he is on everything else about addiction. At one kinda terrifying meeting I went to in a bad part of Seattle, maybe six-seven years ago, there was a back row of several really grizzled guys who would say "SHUT UP AND DON'T DRINK!" every time they thought someone was piling on the agony about how haaaaard it was to quit.)

Moira wrote: "Whatever). I was sort of clutching at anything and everything in very early sobriety, so I powered through it (I admit, freely skimming over some of the non-addiction stuff). So that was my personal hook that got me through the book when my attention flagged. I think without something like that, it can be a lot harder to read."

It's such a powerful combination when a book comes to you (or you to the book) at just the right time. Such strong motivation for you to keep reading, too!

Rod wrote: "Kris wrote: "Rod, you're in charge of group pep-talks. :)"
What we need is a drill instructor. "Look at this group they gave me! You all make me sick! You pansies look like you couldn't handle ..."

"The Crocodiles talk about how they can't count the number of guys that've Started Reading for a while and drifted away and gone back Out There and never finished...."

Kris wrote: "Thanks! I would do it, but since you put together all the links and info, I wanted that to be clear. :) "

Aww! Well NP, I was v flattered.