First Monday Book Day

Infinite Monday

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It seems somehow fitting that a number of us are attempting to read Infinite Jest just as the regular baseball season ends. With the Twins done for the year, we all have oodles of spare time on our hands, right?

Okay, okay, I jest.* I have to confess I don't yet have the book in my hands, but writing this post prompted me to at least order it. I don't know how useful background information is going to be, but I thought I'd at least hit a few main points.

Wallace lived from 1962-2008.** He was born in Ithaca, New York, and spent much of his childhood in Urbana, Illinois. During this time, he became a regionally ranked tennis player. He attended Amherst college and majored in English and philosophy. He went on to get a MFA*** in creative writing from the University of Arizona. His first novel, The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, while he was still in graduate school. Starting in 2002, he taught at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Wallace began writing Infinite Jest in 1991. "I wanted to do something sad," he said in a 1996 interview**** given shortly after the book was published. "I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium."*****

According to Ryan Compton's "Infinite Jest by the Numbers," Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word novel.

A quick search revealed that the Internet has no shortage of resources about either DFW or this book. I'm not sure how much I want to delve into these--part of me just wants to encounter the book on its own terms and see where that gets me. But if you're curious (or if I change my mind), here are a few that seem particularly informative.

The Howling Fantods: I have no idea what a fantod is, but this site boasts the following subheader "David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97." The link I provided here will bring you specifically to the Infinite Jest section of the site.

Infinite Jest Wiki: This includes an index for the book along with explanations of key terms

And Like But So: A Character Guide to Infinite Jest: I have a terrible habit of reading only the first couple letters of a character's name and then skipping over the rest. In a novel with a lot of characters, this could pose a problem for me, so this site may be just what I need.

1997 Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air

*Ouch. That's bad, even for me.
**I'm trying to figure out whether I should mention his death was due to suicide. I don't want it to overshadow everything else, so I guess I'll just acknowledge it here.
***an MFA(?)
****Did you have any idea Salon has been around that long? I'm pretty sure the first I heard of it was in 2000.
*****He apparently also had a thing for footnotes.

60 thoughts on “Infinite Monday”

  1. Thanks, Pepper!

    I'm undecided on whether I want to tackle this right now (lots of semester-related reading projects), but I might do it later in the year/early 2016, so I'm interested to see what the Nation has to say about it.

  2. In a funny coincidence, I just saw this:

    (this is pursuant to ****)

    1. Oh, crud. I edited the comment and screwed up the embed. Let's do this again.

      1. Oh, never mind. Admin-type guys, feel free to delete both responses to that original comment, which now looks perfectly fine. Or just leave them both so that I look ridiculous. 😉

  3. I misplaced 100 Years Of Solitude so haven't finished that. I'm conflicted about whether I should finish it before tackling IJ. Which I, also, do not currently possess. But I have a source for it, I think, so... I should soonish. Anyway, I do intend on jumping into it sooner rather than later.

  4. I'm just about done with my library book. Then I'll be trying IJ again. I got about 15%ish percent through the book once. It was really engrossing, but it takes a lot of work to get through. I did need the character guide last time I tried. Between the sprawling scope of both the universe in which it's set as well as the physical structure of the nested footnotes, I went a week or more at times between mentions of a character and I was constantly thinking "I've heard of the, but who are they again?"

  6. This sounds like a great daunting project to try to get through. I remember I went through something similar when reading Atlas Shrugged. That took forever.

    Also, this made me think. We did a summer mix with regards to music. What if we did something like a Winter Reading List - where we each recommend a book for others to read? I know I'd love to have a list of books to read, and it feels like every time I go to the library, I can't think of a single thing I want to check out.

    1. We were gonna go this weekend, but FW ended up staying a lot later than she planned at her godson's birthday party. We're going this week sometime.

      1. The items I had problems with are ones he's mentioned in interviews that he has problems with as well. He intentionally ignored the radiation issue; others are based on newer information and he says he'd write essentially the same book but invent different problems the protagonists would have to solve. That said, it's required reading at NASA, so he's got stuff essentially right.

  8. Onward through Vonnegut novels I go.

    Galapagos this month. I really liked it, and I remember liking it quite a bit the last time I read it. One thing that I'm noticing as I re-read these books is that the stuff that stuck with me from my high school/college reads of the books tended to be the weird stuff, even though that's really not a huge part of the books. I still enjoy Vonnegut's style and the worlds that he creates.

    2. I also read Galapagos this month as Dr. Chop is teaching it as part of a evolution + lit course.

  10. Pynchon. Against the Day. Pg 287. Slog. Only 1085-287 left. I can barely tell the characters apart. And the Chums.

    1. The characters begin to distinguish themselves. The less important ones drop away. Any particular challenges, I'm a happy sounding board.

      Cripes I love that book in retrospect.

  11. I've been reading Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen. The first 150 pages were a slog, but then it's really picked up. He has some incredible wordplay and lots of allegories hinting at Google, WikiLeaks, etc. I don't read much modern fiction, but this has been very enjoyable.

    1. Finished Book of Numbers. After struggling through the beginning, I really loved it once it got going. It's filled with compelling unlikable characters, but the writing is heavenly and creative.

    1. No, but I read a couple reviews and saw plenty of, uh, opinions about him on Twitter. What did you think?

      1. I just went back through old First Book Mondays and updated my Goodreads profile. It's nice to have a record here, because I forgot I read about 80% of those that I did.

  14. September books:
    I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam. Nonfiction. The title and subtitle make me cringe to the extent that I considered not including this in my list. But whatever, I’m already an outlier here in at least one respect. And fortunately, the book itself is interesting. For much of this year, I’ve been telling practically anyone within earshot that I need more hours in the day. So I decided to do something about it. I’d read the author’s book about money a number of months ago and liked her conversational tone and lack of adherence to conventional wisdom. This book came out of Vanderkam’s examination of time logs kept by a range of women—all with children in the house and all making at least $100,000 annually*. (Spoiler: I fit into only one of these two categories.) She termed her work “the mosaic project” and uses the idea of a mosaic as a metaphor throughout the book to talk about how it’s possible to rearrange the tiles of one’s life. The heart of the book is about figuring out what’s most important and then finding ways to find time for it. She also noted that women with children under the age of 2 really do have less free time than everyone else. Now that my youngest has turned 2, I’m optimistic that I really will have a little more time—and now I have some new ideas for how to think about how to organize it.

    *Obviously this is a very privileged group, so there are certain biases inherent in the content of the book. Not everyone has the range of options that this group of women has.

    David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Nonfiction collection of previously published material. These interviews with Wallace span from 1996 to the last interview he ever gave, one with the Wall Street Journal in early 2008. I don’t know that I gained all that much insight from reading this slim book. The Salon interview, which I linked to above, is probably the most relevant as far as Infinite Jest goes. It struck me that DFW felt fairly awkward and self-conscious in his early interviews. The final interview (which had to do with DFW’s book about John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign) felt more slick, which might be a combination of how the review was edited and how DFW’s interview style evolved as he gained more experience talking with reporters, etc.

    Cut Both Ways by Carrie Mesrobian. YA novel. Will is a senior in high school and finds himself unexpectedly in the first two real romantic relationships he’s ever had—one with a girl named Brandy and the other with a guy named Angus. Will is sure he’s not gay, but what does this all mean? In addition, spends his last year of high school moving between the urban home of his alcoholic father, which is a disaster area masquerading as a renovation, and the suburban home of his remarried mother who has twin daughters with her second husband. The class differences explored in this novel were particularly interesting to me. I loved Mesrobian’s debut novel, Sex & Violence, and while this one didn’t feel as strong (and it’s definitely not for someone who wants a really plot-driven storyline), it was still a quick and engrossing read.

    Bonus: local author!

  15. September Books:

    I got the first eBook Flights from Publishing Genius (a collection of three short eBook novellas).

    Gabe Durham - Locked Away - Like a warped fairy tale about a town that has just discovered cellars and locks. This was my favorite of the three.
    Lily Hoang - Invisible Women - Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome discuss the idea of the universal woman (the idea is proposed, redefined, ridiculed, and partially confirmed), the structure of the book was interesting. I liked it.
    Bob Schofield - Man Bites Cloud - Amusing, cranky and weird prose poetry.

    La Grande by Juan Jose Saer - I read this because it made the Best Translated Book Award shortlist and it was published by Open Letter Books (I've read a bunch of their books and enjoyed most of them). The description was so lush and dense that it reminded me of a Tarakovsky film. A week in the life of a group of a literary group and the spectre of a somewhat tyrannical revolutionary editor.

    Postures by Grant Maierhofer - X is the main character, a writer who has been published (kind of) and is trying to complete an MFA in Chicago. This reminded me of a more detached Hunger in that X is self-destructive and committed to a set of principles that don't necessarily make sense to the reader. The difference is that X is self-aware enough that it's hard to picture him fully committing to his self destruction. The characters were very full, and even when the story distorted out of reality on occasion, they didn't lose their place in the novel.

    The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - Harry August keeps reliving the same life over and over again, remembering everything from previous iterations. Eventually he begins to realize that the world is ending faster than it should and sets out to discover why. This book won the Campbell Award for best sci-fi novel of 2014, and it was pretty good.

  16. Infinite Jest received. Now it will sit on my bookshelf for a few days while I stare at the binding to see what, exactly, I've gotten myself into.

  17. I knew Salon was around that long. One of my college friends (co-editor of the Student newspaper for a Semester!) read it pretty regularly in the late 90s and actually subscribed when most content went behind a paywall. She let me use her login for King Kaufman's sports columns.

    1. I remember when Slate launched and I thought it was a corporate version of Salon.

      Slate Pitch SelectShow

  18. 20,584 unique words
    Any hapax legomena?

    I have a terrible habit of reading only the first couple letters of a character's name and then skipping over the rest.
    Towards the end of my college education, I had a few books to read that had characters with foreign names that bled together in my mind. I knew from past experience (Russian novels: begun for "fun", quit because it took 30 days to read 150 pages) that I needed to keep them straight. I used a large index card as the bookmark and wrote the main characters names, name versions, and basic relationships in it. Before I'd start reading, I'd glance over all that, or if I wasn't sure which of six brothers this one was. I'll be sure to use that method again if I ever attempt another Russian novel.

    1. Any hapax legomena?
      Already found one at the bottom of page 5: Kekuléan.
      (The book arrived last night, and I started on the bus this morning. I got all the way to page 8.)

    2. AMR, your index card idea is fantastic. I recall struggling a fair amount with the names in War and Peace when I read it years ago.

      I usually forgo a bookmark (when I was young, I simply memorized the page number where I left off; now I just remember approximately where in the book I am), but I'm going to need to keep track of where I am in IJ.

  19. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien - Probably the most powerful and unsettling book I've read about war. In some ways a pseudo-autobiography, in other ways a novel, each chapter is in the form of a short story that recounts a distinct episode, but using the same group of characters, within the larger context of an Army platoon (or squad) fighting in Vietnam. It was amazing and terrible, as much about the war in Vietnam as about what war is to men, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

    Lieutenant Hornblower by C.S. Forester - 2nd Hornblower novel chronologically, but the 7th published. I liked the characters and storytelling enough after the first one to pick up the second. Told from the perspective of William Bush, a Third Lieutenant aboard the ship Hornblower is serving on. Apparently, "The book is unique in the series in being told not from Horatio Hornblower's point of view, but rather from Bush's." Good stuff - lighter fare after reading Things...

    Going After Cacciato also by O'Brien - Winner of the '79 National Book Award. Only a chapter in, but I can already start to see why.

    1. I freaking love The Things They Carried. I think my favorite story in there is "How to Tell a True War Story." I've never read Cacciato; I read In the Lake of the Woods many years ago and liked it well enough, though it didn't stick with me in the way TTTC has.

      1. I was supposed to read both in a class in college, but I wasn't the greatest student. I've regretted doing so, and mean to go back to them one day.

      2. Yeah, TTTC is amazing. I read it in both high school and college. I've also read Tomcat In Love by O'Brien, but that one didn't work for me as well as the TTTC.

    2. I read TTTC this past month, too. It was on my list of top 100 high school American lit books.

      I am reading "The Chosen" now.

        1. I enjoyed it but a little thrown off by the fiction/non-fiction aspect. I didn't know anything about the story going into it.

    3. I got to meet O'Brien when I was in college, he did a quarter as writer in residence at SCSU and was friends with the professor who ran (and still runs) the creative writing program. He even critiqued one of my short stories, told me the ending was too O'Henry for modern fiction and he was right, the new ending I wrote was much better, more ambiguous, more resonant. At the time he had just published The Nuclear Age, and I remember him reading some stuff to our fiction class that ended up in The Things They Carried, the story about going home and driving around the lake. Nice guy, a little intense, loves baseball.

      2. The story about driving around the lake takes place on the 4th of July, right? It's set in Iowa but the parks mentioned in the story are all in Worthington, Minnesota. My grandparents on my dad's side lived there, so when I was young I spent some quality time at those parks.

  20. About a 1/3 into A Walk In the Woods by Bill Bryson.

    A buddy at work heard of my quest to go CT end to end from MA to the Long Island Sound, and left this book at my desk.

    So far, love it. Bryson rocks, and Katz rulz.

    Did the Hartford Half last weekend, but oncet the blisters heal, am back to add on to my existing segments totaling 9'ish miles towards my goal of 111 total trail miles for the end-to-end goal.

    1. I liked that book but the last third of the book seemed pretty pointless. My wife just read it and had the same opinion.

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