I travel a lot, but I rarely send postcards, probably because they make me stop and assess my trip before it is over. How can I be sure that everything is beautiful and I wish you were here? Tomorrow might suck. I would rather wait until I get home and let you know how the trip was as a whole.

I generally have the same approach to talking or writing about books. When I used to teach literature, I would structure my syllabus so that the course would start out with short stories, poems, or essays. The daily reading wasn’t too hard because there would be a novel looming a couple weeks out and when we started talking about the novel, the students were expected to have completed it. Same goes for the next one. While we are discussing and writing about novel #1, they are reading novel #2. It is challenging to teach a book in chunks and I am not convinced it helps the students value the work. It puts the teacher in the role of tour guide, explaining the meaning of things as we pass them.

I think this is why I haven’t been writing about my infinite summer and my reading of Infinite Jest. I am about half way through the book and I still love it. In fact, I think it is going to end up as a favorite of mine, but I would rather not put it on the list yet. After all, I don’t know what is to come in the next half. It might suck. I doubt it, but it might.

I am also not a social reader. I have given guest talks at book clubs, but I don’t participate in any. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for talking about books. The time, is after they are read, the place is usually a bar. Right now much of the online discourse about Infinite Jest is about getting through it, whether people should finish or not, and what the author “meant” by X, Y, or Z. I am not critical of that (ok, I am critical of all the talk of authorial intention), and I hope that the discussions and the tips for sticking with it are helping people enjoy the book.

For those who are not enjoying the book, I say move on. Life is too short to read books you don’t like in your free time. There are plenty of other books to enjoy. For those who plan to complete it, I hope the discussion will really kick in when the book is complete, because that should be the most fruitful time for all this exegesis.

So, unless I am really moved to write about some segment of the book in the next weeks, I probably won’t post on Infinite Jest again until I finish it. I am enjoying the book. I don’t find it to be a difficult book, but it does take time, time that is sometimes hard to find.

Happy Reading

tags: Books | david foster wallace | infinite jest | Infinite Summer | reading