Stephen M's Reviews > Infinite Jest

Bravo to you as well for reading this! I'll be joining in after I get through a few more Mitchell books. I saw your comment about being busy, I hear ya there! School and 60hr work weeks have been really cutting into my reading time, we should just get paid to read hah.

s.penkevich wrote: "we should just get paid to read"

Yeah, no kidding. I think that is the ultimate goal of my life, for that or for writing. Good luck to you with your readings too. I loved Number9dream and am thinking of re-reading soon, then Cloud Atlas again before the movie comes out.

Well as soon as I'm done with Ghostwritten I'm unto Number9dream if you'd want to join in!

Hope Infinite Jest is treating you well. It's another one of my top contenders for exiled-on-the-moon-with-only-one-book books.

Isn't it about time Mitchell published his next creation?

The wait is excruciating. He definitely does. Have you seen the info that Ian posted about it? Looks intriguing.
And yes, I can almost say the same about Infinite Jest as you even though I'm not done. I just wish I had more time to read it.

How far into IJ are you Stephen?

Only a third of the way. I'll read as much as I can in the meantime, then devour it over spring break. I already have five or so pages marked as some of my favorite things written.

(Kate Gombert in therapy, a page-long description of the perfect tennis swing, Hal's bong hit and dream, Joelle freebasing, Orin's rise and fall in college football, on and on.)

@tim http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... message 16.

Oh man, the part with Kate Gompert at the start totally blew me away. Have you got to the bit where he talks about what you learn staying at Ennet House? The part where every sentence starts with 'that'?

Yes, I forget to mention that part. It is unbelievably good. What amazes me is that he starts these differently styled vignettes and is able to sustain it for so long and keep it interesting. There is so much brilliant wisdom packed into it, but it never becomes cheesy or forced. DFW could write anything in any style.

He really is incredible. I'm sort of sad that I read it though because now whenever I'm in the middle of a novel I always see it out the corner of my eye and think 'man, I wish I was just reading Infinite Jest.'

Haha, yeah same. See my 'The Sun Also Rises' review.

This might have to be the year for me, too.

I see you five starred TPK Ian, so you'll probably love IJ. It's not so difficult, it's just a very long, pleasurable read.

I don't object to length as long as it's pleasurable. And can be enjoyed horizontally.

Thats what she said!

(thanks for that magnificent set up Ian.)

Ian wrote: "This might have to be the year for me, too."

You should definitely mount this Ian. You won't regret the strain it will put on your hands.

It does take its toll on the wrists.

It was a little earlier, around page 73. Being a person who has dealt with anxiety and depression, it has been the best description of it that I've ever read. (This was going to be in the review, but oh well). I completely believe that DFW went through the things he writes here. There's no way he couldn't have.

This thread is a gold mine of quality that's what she saids. Sorry to kill the dw fervour going on here.

It's okay. We can still get stimulated from DFW, even if it's only in jest.

tim wrote: "It does take its toll on the wrists."

A gentleman always takes the weight on his elbows.

I should take a page out of Ian's book of suave and subtle innuendoes.

I only have the one page. You can have it as long as I can climb innuendo to refresh my memory occasionally.

Stephen M wrote: "You should definitely mount this Ian."

That reminds me of the trainee lawyer who wanted to mount a loose woman as a test case.

I can totally relate to the "man, I wish I was just reading IJ" thing that Sean mentioned a while ago. I read it every year in April just because of that.

That's a fine tradition. How many times have you read it?

I believe this'll be my fifth all-the-way-through read. I pick it up and read individual parts more often than that, though.

I've thought about doing that! I read it for the first time in December, so it could be a nice end of year ritual.

Yeah, I think I read it in March and April originally, and I tend to agree with T.S. Eliot and Deep Purple's Rod Evans when they say April is the cruelest month, so I kept up the tradition.

T.S. Eliot must have been an anticipatory Deep Purple fan.

In The Waste Land, April breeds light purple lilacs out of the dead land.

And his description of man as a human engine hints that he was a bit of a machine head.

He was also involved on the margins of the libretto for "A Child of Our Time":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_...

"the expression thereon was most assuredly quite enough to force anybody with an operant limbic system to leg it right out of her dysfunctional foster family's home, nay and the whole community of Saugus MA, now homeless and scarred and forced by dark psychic forces straight to Route 1's infamous gauntlet of neon-lit depravity and addiction, to try and forget, rasa the tabula, wipe the memory totally out, numb it with opiates. Voice trembling, she accepts the chairperson's proffered bandanna-hankie and blows her nose one nostril at a time and says she can almost see It all over again: Its expression: in the vanity's lights only Its eyes' whites showed, and while Its utter catatonia and paralysis prevented the contraction of Its luridly roughed face's circumoral muscles into any conventional human facial-type expression, nevertheless some hideously mobile and expressive layer in the moist regions below real people's expressive facial layer, some slow-twitch layer unique to it, had blindly contracted, somehow, to gather the blank soft cheese of Its face into the sort of pinched gasping look of neurologic concentration that marks a carnal bliss beyond smiles or sighs. Its face looked post-coital sort of the way you'd imagine the vacuole and optica of a protozoan looking post-coital after it's shuddered and shot its mono-cellular load into the cold waters of some really old sea."

HOLE-LY SHIT.
I had to stop, just to let this sink in.
Rasa the tabula?!?! I am using that from now on.

Does it really say "lymbic"? I always thought it was spelled "limbic." At any rate, yeah, that's certainly a memorable part. Looking forward to my annual reread.

Es culpa mia.

Good catch. I'd love to see a long review from you on your reread. Just a thought.

One of these days, I'm going to give a book the "Ian" treatment and take extensive notes in the "writings" section. I would have done it for this if it were summer, or another kind of break.

Sorry for the inadvertent nitpick. Actually, Wallace has his characters misspell words pretty often, even in their thoughts, which I'm sure you've noticed (e.g. Pemulis saying 'irregardless' or Gately's Sir Osis of Thuliver), and I was just wondering if it was one of those.

I do plan on writing a really long, personal, exhaustive review of IJ this spring. I kind of like the one that's there already, but it is undoubtedly a copout.

Stephen M wrote: "One of these days, I'm going to give a book the "Ian" treatment and take extensive notes in the "writings" section."

I've done it for a few larger undertakings. It helped me to read a book twice in one go and think about what I wanted to write.

I've since bought a Kindle and have used pdf versions of a few novels to do the same thing.

That way, I didn't have to type text from the novel.

Do any of you highlight and take notes in pdf or other digital versions?

It's funny to look through my old pre-GR novels and not see one pencil mark.

I must have been prioritising their re-sale value.

Ian wrote: "Stephen M wrote: "One of these days, I'm going to give a book the "Ian" treatment and take extensive notes in the "writings" section."

I've done it for a few larger undertakings. It helped me to r..."

I mark some lines using post-it tabs in books or bookmark the text on Kindle, basically for quotes which I like or something I may want to come back to later.
I don't take any notes though. I don't like interrupting my reading for taking notes.

For the first time ever today I started making notes "ian style", but didn't write on the book, just been putting the notes in my moleskine journal. I don't think I would be able to order my thoughts about House of Leaves (my current read without it). I'm planning on reading Infinite Jest very soon and I think this might get the same treatment.

I started taking notes when I read "The Pale King".

First, they were in pencil in the margins, then I would type more detailed notes in My Writings.

I read a fair bit of the novel on a two hour plane trip.

I sat next to a woman with an iPad who looked scornfully at my brick and pencil and decided that she wouldn't talk to me for two hours.

She was reading some sort of fantasy novel.

Anyway, as soon as we took off, I dropped my pencil and it rolled back to the back of the plane and was never seen again.

I could feel her laughing inside.

I've used pdf's on my desktop, but haven't tried to bookmark or highlight on my new Kindle yet.

My wife, F.M. Sushi has an iPad and loves it, but isn't a big reader.

I'm wondering about a Samsung Galaxy, much to the disgust of our Apple-obsessed daughters.

They think you can only be cool if you have an "i" in front, and iDad doesn't count.

how far along are ya?

Far enough.....

I'm hoping to make a shot for the end by the weekend. We'll see. No promises.

We won't hold you too it, Stephen, but it would be nice!

Of course, once you've reached the summit, you still need to make it back to base camp. That's when you write your review. For now, though, just focus on the peak and all its magnificent glory.

Well, I've already written a bit about it, so hopefully the review won't take too long. I feel like IJ more than any other book has the longest reviews written about it. Understandable, there's so much to be said about it.

When I originally wrote my review for IJ, I wanted it to be a conscious exception to that generalization (and it was, though maybe not for the better) (also, I'm going to rewrite it soon, so the point is moot).

Also, that chance meeting the other day was too unexpected for me to say anything coherent, sorry about that. Pretty crazy though, right?

I noticed that about your review. It was a nice change of pace. But really, I'm really curious to hear everything people have to say about the book. I don't mind reading long reviews, as long as they have intelligent points that are worth the while.

Indeed haha. Being in the same city, I guess it's bound to happen. I'm at the library every Monday evening.

Get anything good?

Yeah, The Flame Alphabet, which is going to have to wait until I'm finished with Threats. (Which will likely be soon)

Flame Alphabet is next on my list. I get the feeling that I'll enjoy a little more than the Amelia Grey. Hope you're enjoying Threats well enough.

Thomas wrote: "well now i have egg on my face. i already read and enjoyed that one.

i'm reading the boudinot."

Awesome. Another on the Joshua reading list. Good stuff. I listened to an interview with Boudinot, great stuff. I'll definitely get around to Blueprints this year as well.

I look forward to an epic review.

It's the only way to respond to such a book. I feel intimidated by all the other reviews on the site and, goes without saying, the epicness of the book itself.

One month to knock it over?