February 23, 2016, will mark twenty years since Infinite Jest was first loosed upon the world.* A new edition is coming out with a brand-new cloudless cover (designed by a fan!) and a foreword by Tom Bissell**.

The title of this post comes from the book Quack This Way: David Foster Wallace & Bryan A. Garner Talk Language and Writing***. David Foster Wallace says:

Reading is a very strange thing. We get talked to about it and talk explicitly about it in first grade and second grade and third grade, and then it all devolves into interpretation. But if you think about what’s going on when you read, you’re processing information at an incredible rate.

I'm not sure my own rate is all that incredible, but I made it past page 100 of IJ on the bus this morning, so that feels like some sort of progress.

The New York Times today has a piece adapted from the new foreword. I hate reading forewords in actual books, but I might just read this.

So what are you reading?

*Random Yeats reference included for no good reason other than that I like it.
**I have no idea who he is, but I assume I should. He's a journalist, critic, and fiction writer.
***More on the story behind this particular book, which was published posthumously, here.