David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

Consuming, chaotic, pathologically sincere, profound, unflinching, difficult -- but very rewarding. Probably, in all seriousness -- as much as it pains me to add to the already-nauseating amounts of hyperbole surrounding this book -- probably a work of actual genius. Despite all of that... and despite the inscrutable narrative structure, interminable footnotes and digressions, astonishingly expansive vocabulary, and mindnumbing amounts of incidental detail... it's also, somehow, just endlessly entertaining.

It's hard to say anything about the experience of reading this novel that hasn't been said before, and better. I spent six weeks reading it (and nothing else), and two more weeks pondering it, reading blog posts by armchair IJ scholars, and skimming back through the text to try to put all the pieces together.

In the end I can say it was not only a worthwhile journey, but that it left my perspective on the world irrevocably changed.

I wish you way more than luck.

This is an awful book. I don't know what kind of literary group-think has people claiming it is good. I have read many positive reviews of it and I have not found a good defense of this book in any of them.

If you are thinking of picking up this book here is my advice:

1. get it from a public library so you don't waste money

2. do not feel bad about putting it down unfinished - ignore the fact that so many people gave it a good review and that it is considered a "great american novel"

Other people I know who read it found it a "chore" - some of the few negative reviewers here on goodreads also used that word. But at the end of this "chore" you don't have a tidy house or a good home-cooked meal - you just have the knowledge that you wasted time.

If you are going through a list of "great contemporary books" you will find others that are not obscurantist nonsense, so take comfort: many highbrow books are not awful!