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

I am now almost a third of the way through Infinite Jest, so I will be careful about spoilers for anyone who is following the prescribed schedule of Infinite Summer. I may allude to things you have not yet read, or even quote lines, but I won’t give any actual spoilers without warning.

As I expected, this is a funny book.¹ I have been doing lots of my reading on airplanes and have found myself laughing out loud on several occasions, silencing my chuckles as fellow travelers peek out from under their sleep masks to see what kind of lunatic is sitting in 6H. The sheer absurdity of some of the situations is amusing, but it is usually the puns that incite audible cachinnation in this jet-lagged reader.

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

Interviewer: You are an American author, so why do you choose to write in French? Author: I don’t. All my works are in English. Interviewer: I have read your works and they are in French. They have not even been translated into English. Author: I am the author, who are you going to trust, me or my work?

tags: david foster wallace | Infinite Summer

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