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.

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

So I am just past the third week’s milestone in my first reading of Infinite Jest and I have Pynchon on my mind. If you haven’t read that far, don’t worry. I won’t put any spoilers here. This post is more about my reading method than anything in the text.

I got through my first significant chunk of Infinite Jest on a flight to Australia. I was seated on the aisle next to a Russian woman and her twelve-year-old son who was continuously airsick. Sleep was not much of an option for me as the woman got up to dispose of the neatly packaged vomit and stock up on fresh airsick bags about every hour and I had to get up to let her out. The flight was packed. There was nowhere to go.

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

Afraid of a big book, not I…

I’ve read Ulysses three times. I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow twice. I read Underworld and Mason & Dixon in the same year. Hell, I read Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors in a single summer. Admittedly, I was studying for my comps and it sucked.

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