‘Don’t bother reading *Infinite Jest*. Just pretend you have, and the effect will be much the same.’
edit: Please, please notice the quotation marks around that TL;DR. It is a summary of the article, not a statement of personal opinion.
mara07985 on
I went to school with a guy who carried it around for months, one day I asked him what it was about and he said “ I don’t know I just stash whiskey in this thing but I started looking at the back so I might buy a new copy to read soon”
AJakeR on
I’m reading IJ right now . I’m 400 pages in but now I see I needn’t have bothered actually reading it to cultivate the same effect 🙂
​
For reference, I am enjoying it.
Rangerrickbutsaucier on
Hating on Infinite Jest is the adult equivalent of children making fun of other children for using words out of their vocabulary. Yes, pseudointellectualism is annoying, but IJ is a great book with well-rounded characters, an interesting plot, a well-developed style, and an original presentation. I like “easy” reading as much as the next guy – my favorite author is Stephen King – but just because IJ is a bit of an undertaking doesn’t mean it’s inherently snobby.
imatumahimatumah on
I read Infinite Jest, and it really is an amazing book. My mind tends to wander a lot so I had to constantly go back and re-read sections of it. And the footnotes, whatever you want to call it, while tolerated in his other books, got exhausting in this book, I would just put a Post-it note in the back so it was easier to flip to when I needed to. You really need a quiet place and no distractions, but the thing about this book is you really, really get your moneys worth. I posted about this once before but one of the editions has a forward by Dave Eggers that totally sums it up, “There’s not a lazy sentence in this book.” It’s not about being a book snob or anything else, it’s just a chance to read a book where every sentence was carefully constructed and agonized over. At the very beginning of the book it seems tedious at first because you don’t know what’s going on. Then there was the part where Wallace describes the bathroom at the school and I was hooked.
VanyaKmzv on
I personally really like IJ. I finished it earlier this year and still find myself reflecting on it once in a while. That being said, his non-fiction communicates similar ideas and does so far better than his fiction does, imho.
ShabbyTheSloth on
Real nerds are out there lying about reading Proust.
Tchaikovsky08 on
> 7. Tuck book into public-radio tote and carry around town. Offer Kindle readers on subway opportunity to smell real paper, like orphans smelling fresh bread.
“Like orphans smelling fresh bread” lmaooooo
JaimesLeftHand on
I liked it. A few false starts (probably read the first bit about the interview half a dozen times), but once it clicked I really enjoyed it. Anyone who’s dealt with addiction in any way will see some things they recognize. Lots of bits of wisdom there.
His essays are a lot more easily enjoyed. A Supposedly Fun Thing… is a good place to start
[deleted] on
As a point of reference, how does Infinite Jest compare in difficulty level to Gravity’s Rainbow, and other Pynchon works?
I tried getting into Gravity’s Rainbow after I saw a lot of people gushing on it. I found it too dense and I didn’t have the patience to go figure the thing out.
[deleted] on
[removed]
[deleted] on
Reminds me of the joke:
How do you know if someone has read Infinite Jest?
Don’t worry; they let you know.
FuzzyYellowBallz on
What? I thought IJ was a great read. Bummed to hear there are bad feelings towards DJW on this sub. Some of his short stories are super fun.
If you’re at all interested in reading it, I’d say go for it and don’t let some reddit bros shame you into enjoying a fun book.
[deleted] on
I don’t really understand why people think Infinite Jest is terribly difficult to read. It is odd, certainly, and hopping back and forth with the footnotes can be tedious, but I don’t think it’s that hard to just read it.
darthvolta on
It’s really not that hard. Just keep reading.
Gravity’s Rainbow feels much harder. I’ve tried and failed to read that about 5 times.
jordaniac89 on
I’m ashamed to say I did this with Gravity’s Rainbow for a while.
Infinite jest is truly one of the funniest books I’ve ever read
[deleted] on
I feel like this article is beating a dead horse; people have been making these jokes for decades now. It’s almost a form of cultural currency *not* to read IJ, to be above reading it.
Scorn_For_Stupidity on
I came into that article honestly wanting tips to read Infinite Jest, it’s my Moby Dick (which I just had to google because I haven’t read Moby Dick either and thought that was the captain’s name, I am a fraud).
piercew91 on
These types of posts about Infinite Jest are sort of upsetting and perpetuate an idea about the book that entirely takes away from its genius. I’ve never read a piece of fiction that gets to the heart of addiction like this book does. Not to mention that many of the jokes made about it are based on it being unwieldy, when it’s really not that hard of a read. Joyce, Pynchon, and Faulkner are hard to read…IJ is just long and sprawling. It’s my favorite book of all time and it sucks that its connected with hipsters who just want to flex how well read they are.
LogansRun22 on
1. Open book
2. Look at words
3. Turn pages to look at more words
4. ?
5. Profit
infini7 on
Once I figured out that he was writing with “maximum detail” as a stylistic exercise, I stopped worrying about every single word or sentence and read to enjoy what and how he author chose to describe things.
That was the key that enabled me to finish it.
pfk505 on
I’m in the middle of it now.. Some parts of it are so, so good.. And other parts of it are near-unreadable, if only in how utterly boring and inconsequential they seem to be. Will definitely power through it as the good sections are worth it, but it’s definitely going to take me longer than average for a 1000 pager.
RaspberryBliss on
Is Infinite Jest actually a *great* book, or is it just a long book that a certain type of person enjoys being able to say that they have read?
escargoxpress on
I dated a guy who went on and on about it. I commented on my interest in the book from the praise he was giving it, and he immediately says, ‘You wouldn’t get it, it’s way above your reading comprehension.’
Note: he didn’t actually give me any details on content, but rather how brilliant DFW was.
Teakilla on
/rbooks and hating classics and pretending anyone who liked one or read one is just trying to show off while patting themselves on the back for reading harry potter for the 8th time
name a more iconic duo
milkmustache420 on
Is the author of this article the same people that made fun of 16 year old me for saying Catcher in the Rye was my favorite book at the time???😭 Let people like stuff. 😭
[deleted] on
This book took me two months to read. I could only usually get through 5-20 pages in a single sitting. I also felt lost for the first few hundred pages until I started to see how all of the seemingly disparate storylines would come together. I finished the book feeling like I needed to immediately re-read it in order to actually understand what I’d read, since it’s so vast and complex, and I haven’t done that yet 10 years later. I probably will one day, but it’s a daunting book.
​
A couple of random things I love about this book for those who are considering picking it up:
* Wallace foresaw a lot of the negative consequences of the internet and modernization: social isolation, creating a false, idealized digital persona to obscure your true self, binge-watching entertainment, and a lot more. He wrote this book in 1996, and parts of it still feel eerily contemporary.
* Don Gately is the greatest character I’ve ever read. I don’t want to give anything away, but he’s an amazing figure, and there are some moments that involve Gately – chiefly the dramatic conflict at/outside the halfway house and the final scene in the book – that rival anything I’ve ever read.
* *Infinite Jest* has some of my favorite one-liners in literature. Chief among them: “Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it’s the wrist of an assailant.”
* Wallace’s ability to notice mundane and yet still profound details about human behavior. He writes about how men and women hold cigarettes differently, how you can’t pick your nose without looking at what comes out of it, how an addict feels waiting for a fix. There were many moments when I read something and thought to myself, *That’s exactly what I do*, or, *I’ve never thought about that before, but it’s true*.
* Wallace reportedly loved to read the Oxford English Dictionary, and it shows. I had to keep a Kindle open to look a word or three every other page. It was a joy to read a book and to learn so much new language. It can be a bit distracting, but it’s also entertaining in its own way.
* The book is uniquely creative. The heavy use of endnotes and footnotes is classic Wallace, but it feels strangely (and often frustratingly) discursive in long-novel form. Wallace’s ideas are also way, way out there – the feral mutant hamsters, the toxic waste dump in Canada, *les assassins des fauteuils roulants*…there’s just a ridiculous amount of creative energy behind this book.
CeruleanRuin on
This *New Yorker* article is aggressively anti-intellectual, and I hate it.
I’m half-convinced it must be a satire of the similar “lol I’m so dumb” listicles that plague the internet.
*Infinite Jest* isn’t that hard to read. It’s just the classic story of a privileged kid whose life goes to shit because he never had to fight for anything and so he doesn’t really know how to fight or care to learn, because the substances he has turned to to cope have shut off those avenues, possibly forever.^1
Everything else in there is just a matryoshka doll of increasingly obscure metaphors for our all-too-often wholly destructive search for meaning in a world that ultimately (probably) doesn’t contain any, and doesn’t care we’re looking.^2
I got lost in it, in a good way, and I came out a better person.
—–
^1 ^(And the thing is, his story isn’t anything special. It’s just one of a million others just like it and not like it at all going on everywhere, at every social strata, because sometimes life is just awful, and sometimes it’s just so boring it makes you cry, and sometimes it’s so incredibly surprising and wonderful and lovely that your heart breaks because you know nothing good like that can stay.)
^2 ^(Also embedded in and comprising those layers: a bunch of other thematically resonant stories of other people who intersect with the main character’s life in some way.^£)
^^£ ^(Don’t let the crazy amount of foot- and end-notes intimidate you. Just think of them as long digressions, or part of this document which is a super detailed study of a particular set of people and everything connected to them, and by extension of you reading it, to you. Because you’re the one reading it, aren’t you? You’re there too, somewhere, I’m sure of it.)
Corndogginit on
Short version:
If anyone is interested in reading IJ and wants an actual tip–read the whole thing as fast as you can while still enjoying it, then go back and reread the first chapter. You will have a delightful “Aha!”
Long Version:
I read somewhere the DFW wanted to write a book that was intentionally difficult to understand or extract meaning from as a whole but was still entertaining and readable moment to moment. I found that he achieved his effect. I finished it, put the book away, didn’t think about it for a year, then opened it again to ponder what I liked about it and reread the first chapter. Suddenly the whole book made sense–its hard to retain the relevant information in Ch 1. through the entire reading, keeping the details suspended in the back of your mind until the end of the book, and the significant details are written in a throw-away style meaning you won’t even know what to suspend, so it was kind of delightful to realize I’d missed such a critical bit of information but was still able to enjoy the book, because (for the most part) scene to scene there’s enough humor and bizarrely intriguing behavior from the characters to keep me reading (I’ll qualify that by saying that I found vast swaths of the book un-fucking-readable because of their punishingly meticulous dullness, though parsing the sentences themselves was not a problem).
32 Comments
> …Open diary. Write, “I am a FRAUD.”
Fucking LOL
TL;DR for those who didn’t read the article:
‘Don’t bother reading *Infinite Jest*. Just pretend you have, and the effect will be much the same.’
edit: Please, please notice the quotation marks around that TL;DR. It is a summary of the article, not a statement of personal opinion.
I went to school with a guy who carried it around for months, one day I asked him what it was about and he said “ I don’t know I just stash whiskey in this thing but I started looking at the back so I might buy a new copy to read soon”
I’m reading IJ right now . I’m 400 pages in but now I see I needn’t have bothered actually reading it to cultivate the same effect 🙂
​
For reference, I am enjoying it.
Hating on Infinite Jest is the adult equivalent of children making fun of other children for using words out of their vocabulary. Yes, pseudointellectualism is annoying, but IJ is a great book with well-rounded characters, an interesting plot, a well-developed style, and an original presentation. I like “easy” reading as much as the next guy – my favorite author is Stephen King – but just because IJ is a bit of an undertaking doesn’t mean it’s inherently snobby.
I read Infinite Jest, and it really is an amazing book. My mind tends to wander a lot so I had to constantly go back and re-read sections of it. And the footnotes, whatever you want to call it, while tolerated in his other books, got exhausting in this book, I would just put a Post-it note in the back so it was easier to flip to when I needed to. You really need a quiet place and no distractions, but the thing about this book is you really, really get your moneys worth. I posted about this once before but one of the editions has a forward by Dave Eggers that totally sums it up, “There’s not a lazy sentence in this book.” It’s not about being a book snob or anything else, it’s just a chance to read a book where every sentence was carefully constructed and agonized over. At the very beginning of the book it seems tedious at first because you don’t know what’s going on. Then there was the part where Wallace describes the bathroom at the school and I was hooked.
I personally really like IJ. I finished it earlier this year and still find myself reflecting on it once in a while. That being said, his non-fiction communicates similar ideas and does so far better than his fiction does, imho.
Real nerds are out there lying about reading Proust.
> 7. Tuck book into public-radio tote and carry around town. Offer Kindle readers on subway opportunity to smell real paper, like orphans smelling fresh bread.
“Like orphans smelling fresh bread” lmaooooo
I liked it. A few false starts (probably read the first bit about the interview half a dozen times), but once it clicked I really enjoyed it. Anyone who’s dealt with addiction in any way will see some things they recognize. Lots of bits of wisdom there.
His essays are a lot more easily enjoyed. A Supposedly Fun Thing… is a good place to start
As a point of reference, how does Infinite Jest compare in difficulty level to Gravity’s Rainbow, and other Pynchon works?
I tried getting into Gravity’s Rainbow after I saw a lot of people gushing on it. I found it too dense and I didn’t have the patience to go figure the thing out.
[removed]
Reminds me of the joke:
How do you know if someone has read Infinite Jest?
Don’t worry; they let you know.
What? I thought IJ was a great read. Bummed to hear there are bad feelings towards DJW on this sub. Some of his short stories are super fun.
If you’re at all interested in reading it, I’d say go for it and don’t let some reddit bros shame you into enjoying a fun book.
I don’t really understand why people think Infinite Jest is terribly difficult to read. It is odd, certainly, and hopping back and forth with the footnotes can be tedious, but I don’t think it’s that hard to just read it.
It’s really not that hard. Just keep reading.
Gravity’s Rainbow feels much harder. I’ve tried and failed to read that about 5 times.
I’m ashamed to say I did this with Gravity’s Rainbow for a while.
also relevant:
[Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20](https://local.theonion.com/girlfriend-stops-reading-david-foster-wallace-breakup-l-1819566753)
Infinite jest is truly one of the funniest books I’ve ever read
I feel like this article is beating a dead horse; people have been making these jokes for decades now. It’s almost a form of cultural currency *not* to read IJ, to be above reading it.
I came into that article honestly wanting tips to read Infinite Jest, it’s my Moby Dick (which I just had to google because I haven’t read Moby Dick either and thought that was the captain’s name, I am a fraud).
These types of posts about Infinite Jest are sort of upsetting and perpetuate an idea about the book that entirely takes away from its genius. I’ve never read a piece of fiction that gets to the heart of addiction like this book does. Not to mention that many of the jokes made about it are based on it being unwieldy, when it’s really not that hard of a read. Joyce, Pynchon, and Faulkner are hard to read…IJ is just long and sprawling. It’s my favorite book of all time and it sucks that its connected with hipsters who just want to flex how well read they are.
1. Open book
2. Look at words
3. Turn pages to look at more words
4. ?
5. Profit
Once I figured out that he was writing with “maximum detail” as a stylistic exercise, I stopped worrying about every single word or sentence and read to enjoy what and how he author chose to describe things.
That was the key that enabled me to finish it.
I’m in the middle of it now.. Some parts of it are so, so good.. And other parts of it are near-unreadable, if only in how utterly boring and inconsequential they seem to be. Will definitely power through it as the good sections are worth it, but it’s definitely going to take me longer than average for a 1000 pager.
Is Infinite Jest actually a *great* book, or is it just a long book that a certain type of person enjoys being able to say that they have read?
I dated a guy who went on and on about it. I commented on my interest in the book from the praise he was giving it, and he immediately says, ‘You wouldn’t get it, it’s way above your reading comprehension.’
Note: he didn’t actually give me any details on content, but rather how brilliant DFW was.
/rbooks and hating classics and pretending anyone who liked one or read one is just trying to show off while patting themselves on the back for reading harry potter for the 8th time
name a more iconic duo
Is the author of this article the same people that made fun of 16 year old me for saying Catcher in the Rye was my favorite book at the time???😭 Let people like stuff. 😭
This book took me two months to read. I could only usually get through 5-20 pages in a single sitting. I also felt lost for the first few hundred pages until I started to see how all of the seemingly disparate storylines would come together. I finished the book feeling like I needed to immediately re-read it in order to actually understand what I’d read, since it’s so vast and complex, and I haven’t done that yet 10 years later. I probably will one day, but it’s a daunting book.
​
A couple of random things I love about this book for those who are considering picking it up:
* Wallace foresaw a lot of the negative consequences of the internet and modernization: social isolation, creating a false, idealized digital persona to obscure your true self, binge-watching entertainment, and a lot more. He wrote this book in 1996, and parts of it still feel eerily contemporary.
* Don Gately is the greatest character I’ve ever read. I don’t want to give anything away, but he’s an amazing figure, and there are some moments that involve Gately – chiefly the dramatic conflict at/outside the halfway house and the final scene in the book – that rival anything I’ve ever read.
* *Infinite Jest* has some of my favorite one-liners in literature. Chief among them: “Stice, oblivious, bites into his sandwich like it’s the wrist of an assailant.”
* Wallace’s ability to notice mundane and yet still profound details about human behavior. He writes about how men and women hold cigarettes differently, how you can’t pick your nose without looking at what comes out of it, how an addict feels waiting for a fix. There were many moments when I read something and thought to myself, *That’s exactly what I do*, or, *I’ve never thought about that before, but it’s true*.
* Wallace reportedly loved to read the Oxford English Dictionary, and it shows. I had to keep a Kindle open to look a word or three every other page. It was a joy to read a book and to learn so much new language. It can be a bit distracting, but it’s also entertaining in its own way.
* The book is uniquely creative. The heavy use of endnotes and footnotes is classic Wallace, but it feels strangely (and often frustratingly) discursive in long-novel form. Wallace’s ideas are also way, way out there – the feral mutant hamsters, the toxic waste dump in Canada, *les assassins des fauteuils roulants*…there’s just a ridiculous amount of creative energy behind this book.
This *New Yorker* article is aggressively anti-intellectual, and I hate it.
I’m half-convinced it must be a satire of the similar “lol I’m so dumb” listicles that plague the internet.
*Infinite Jest* isn’t that hard to read. It’s just the classic story of a privileged kid whose life goes to shit because he never had to fight for anything and so he doesn’t really know how to fight or care to learn, because the substances he has turned to to cope have shut off those avenues, possibly forever.^1
Everything else in there is just a matryoshka doll of increasingly obscure metaphors for our all-too-often wholly destructive search for meaning in a world that ultimately (probably) doesn’t contain any, and doesn’t care we’re looking.^2
I got lost in it, in a good way, and I came out a better person.
—–
^1 ^(And the thing is, his story isn’t anything special. It’s just one of a million others just like it and not like it at all going on everywhere, at every social strata, because sometimes life is just awful, and sometimes it’s just so boring it makes you cry, and sometimes it’s so incredibly surprising and wonderful and lovely that your heart breaks because you know nothing good like that can stay.)
^2 ^(Also embedded in and comprising those layers: a bunch of other thematically resonant stories of other people who intersect with the main character’s life in some way.^£)
^^£ ^(Don’t let the crazy amount of foot- and end-notes intimidate you. Just think of them as long digressions, or part of this document which is a super detailed study of a particular set of people and everything connected to them, and by extension of you reading it, to you. Because you’re the one reading it, aren’t you? You’re there too, somewhere, I’m sure of it.)
Short version:
If anyone is interested in reading IJ and wants an actual tip–read the whole thing as fast as you can while still enjoying it, then go back and reread the first chapter. You will have a delightful “Aha!”
Long Version:
I read somewhere the DFW wanted to write a book that was intentionally difficult to understand or extract meaning from as a whole but was still entertaining and readable moment to moment. I found that he achieved his effect. I finished it, put the book away, didn’t think about it for a year, then opened it again to ponder what I liked about it and reread the first chapter. Suddenly the whole book made sense–its hard to retain the relevant information in Ch 1. through the entire reading, keeping the details suspended in the back of your mind until the end of the book, and the significant details are written in a throw-away style meaning you won’t even know what to suspend, so it was kind of delightful to realize I’d missed such a critical bit of information but was still able to enjoy the book, because (for the most part) scene to scene there’s enough humor and bizarrely intriguing behavior from the characters to keep me reading (I’ll qualify that by saying that I found vast swaths of the book un-fucking-readable because of their punishingly meticulous dullness, though parsing the sentences themselves was not a problem).
Most useful advice: Use two bookmarks.