/lit/ - Literature

>>5964376
>What percentage of /lit/ has actually begun this book?
31%
>What percentage has actually finished?
40%

>>5964376
I'll never read that shit.

>>5964376
How do you think we're going to find these numbers, OP?
Did you think this through?

>>5964376
>implying /lit/ is honest

I've finished it twice. It's a good book.

of people who really regularly visit this board and make it the only 4chan board they post on, I'd say like 60%/50%

it won't possibly take more than a couple months to read even if you're slow and it comes up so often that if I hadn't before I visited here I'd have gotten curious enough to read it by now. same with Gravity's Rainbow and Ulysses.

I've also read it twice. Second time round I made about twenty pages worth of notes in tiny writing.

I picked it up like 2 years ago when I first came on /lit/. Took me another year and a half to pick it up. It's one of my favorite books. Not particularly profound in its ideas concerning media consumption, but some absolutely brilliant descriptions of depression and substance abuse.
Beautifully constructed and addictive.

*****

I started it, only got 300 pages in before bringing it back to the library, I bought it recently though so I will probably jump back in it now.

>>5964419
I don't know about the media consumption bit: the whole loop from telephones to instant video messaging back to telephones was pretty fucking genius.

>>5964376
i read it when i was 15
its pretty good
im sympathised with hal a lot cause i was massively into weed and thought i was cleverer than everyone else

It's not that tough. Read it in a little over three weeks.

i read it in two weeks housesitting for a friend during Lunar New Year, when everything in the country is shut down and I didn't have to work.

sure, it's long, but i thought it was really user friendly. people make such a big deal about how hard of a book it is but i thought it was hilarious, insightful, immersive and even kind of a page turner.

i'd read it again but, yknow, so many books, so little time

Read it about a year ago. Thought it was great. I agree with an earlier post about parts about adiction and depression being really poignant.

I just read Although You End Up Becoming Yourself a few weeks ago about a rolling stone writer who went on the end of DFWs book tour for OK (which is supposed to be a movie soon) and it's just DFW explicitly laying out the themes about media consumption and addiction and needing to give yourself away to something.

Given what we know about his weed use being the same as Hals when he was a teenage tennis star, his alcoholism in grad school, his subsequent hospitalization for depression, and finally killing himself when he went off the ssris that were keeping him alive in 2008. I'd say IF is an autobiography posing as the great American novel which is actually a pretty good way to go about it in this day and age imo.

Also the whole tHenry of optics and how DFW structured the book to follow an optical arc and the joke that infinite jest in the book is endlessly addictive and infinite jest the book is on a narrative loop is brilliant.

Ultimate poser book--anyone who reads it is just pretending. No exceptions, never listen to their lies.

>>5964376

Wow, that's funny because there seems to be a decent amount of parallels between IJ and the Royal Tenenbaums. Just finished IJ too, and loved it. Fun experience. Takes about a month if you work. Idk how people can drop the book (or any book, really). It has mildly unusual structure, but it's as simple as reading a short story collection.

In terms of Hamlet similarities, what big ones are there outside of the opposition to understanding and knowledge being at the forefront of our lives?

>>5964732
>>5964758
>>5964430
>>5964419
ugggh youre all plebs

>>5965261
the freudian shit is probably the real main commonality, the rest is kinda superficial. I also fail to see how that shit that you just said is in hamlet.

>>5965330
Have you read Hamlet? One of the things it is most concerned with are the problems that come from the purely rational thinking that occupied the coming Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods.

Never read it. But I have a feeling it's been overhyped to the point I won't be impressed.

>>5965416
If you ever do read it, try to not let preconceived notions affect your interpretation.

>>5965411
I know the story but i havent "read" it, that's true.
but this theme is implied in the text in which way?
By everyone ignoring Hamlet's insanity?

>>5965433
The most basic is Hamlet's multiple failures to avenge his father when planning and essentially overthinking, and his success when finally his emotion takes over his actions.

I read it before I joined /lit/, while I was working as an extra on The Master

>>5965453
hmmm no offense but i think whoever told you that had their head up their own theory's ass.
Much like the freudian shit in his work, I have a feeling much of this was intuitive and not intentional.
Familial relations are more static and definitely hold-up better than any of the political shit you could assign to it.
I guess I'm not saying youre wrong I just think that theme is not nearly as important as you think it is, dfeinitely not as signifcant as it would be to Infinite jest for instance.

>>5965463
do you think it was better than the master?

>>5965483

They're too dissimilar to make a comparison, but I do remember one of the effete hairstylists saying 'don't forget to read the footnotes' with a tone of sincerity. I laugh every time I think about it

>>5965500
they're kinda more similar than you'd think actually...
you didnt get it

>>5965472
Not the guy you're talking to but I don't like calling Shakespeare Freudian, if anything Freud was a Shakespearian

The biggest parallel was the ghost that haunted Gately you numnuts.

his vision of interlace was also rather prophetic

the people in this thread talking about how theyve finished it and liked it are consistently likable so im excited. im on page like 5

>>5965472
I disagree. Come on - "To be or not to be" and you don't think Hamlet's rationalism and paralysis isn't a central theme of the play? I don't think I'd phrase is in terms of an opposition of understanding and knowledge, but I get what this dude is saying and he's right about it being central to both Hamlet and IJ.

Other simalarities: the Freudian shit, comparisons b/w Enfield Tennis Academy and Elsinor (i.e. the rotten food in the fridge in IJ and "something is rotten in the state of Denmark"), themes of suicide.

>>5965510
no thats the most obvious parallel, not the biggest retard.

>>5964376
read it with no idea wtf it was about
didnt read a synopsis
anything about DFW, nothing
loved it

also
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
^
Every IJ thread forever because so many vacuous cunts didn't get the book

>>5965509
whatever?

>>5965524
oh ya and also the ghost duh how could i forget

>>5965507

I saw The Master as a commentary on the auto-erotic man in a post-Fordism, post-war America, and his attachment to religiously naive people obsessed with power and narrative

IJ to me is much more neurotic and Hamfisted and sprawling, Hal to me is auto-erotic in a similar way to The Master's main characters but his family is the centerpiece of his story, Joaquin's character in The Master is ostensibly a man in need of family, not one who's dealing with the neurosis of knowing that people care for him for some reason

In what way do you see the stories as similar? A 1940s period piece on cultism and male sexuality in a postwar culture vs an academic 1990s period piece on maximalist dysphoria, entertainment and excess?

>>5965521
it probably wasnt /that/ hard. Anticipating netflix and the internet was a pretty logical extension.


>>5965524
i hadnt thought about that "to be or not to be part" i guess that particular scene, with the existential implicatons does have a lot in common with Infinite Jest.

>>5965544
It'd take a while to explain so ill just say that youre not giving enough credit to Wallace's meta-intentions

>>5965472
It's pretty well understood that that is one of the central themes in Hamlet, and I can see the similarities in IJ mainly in the AA program.

>>5965575
youre probably right.

>>5965570
First line of Hamlet
>Who's there?
First line of IJ
>I am

>>5965584
well duh cmon man we've already established that there are definite superficial similarities.
What we're debating are which shared themes are most significant

>>5965588
the struggle with existential paralysis. the father figure represented as a ghost. the commonality in setting. the list goes on....

the most significant shared theme is def the struggle Hal and Hamlet both have with rationality and how it paralyzes them. Hal even directly says at one point that his problem with the play Hamlet is that the character Hamlet doesn't doubt himself enough, that Hamlet should have questioned his own sanity more, not less. Have you even read IJ and Hamlet?

Okay when I said "opposition to understanding and knowledge being at the forefront of our lives" I should have been more clear about that being the scientific and rational thinking that came out of the Enlightenment and leads to the uncertainty of action in both Hamlet and a number of characters in IJ.

>>5965599
I agree but let me expand on that.
the paralysis in hamlet is very different from the one in Infinite jest. in Infinite jest its more of a counsciously-present theme, all post-modern-like from the length and physical form of the novel.

In Hamlet the existential questioning is probably more intuitive and derivative of the form, just like the freudian stuff, so at the end of the day that paralysis is just one of many themes present in the orignal novel

TLDR: That theme is way more important to Infinite jest

In where its much more internalized (I guess hamlets death is kinda like a paralysis in a way, as it comes at the end of fruitless journey).

>>5965632
I mean, really all you're saying now is that Hamlet influenced IJ, and that DFW is anxious about the influence of Shakespeare, and not vice versa which is a pretty trite observation IMO.

I started reading it, got about 100 pages in, and then got mugged and had it stolen from me. I should re-buy this book. I did legitimately enjoy what I read.

>>5965721

Lol who steals books

I'm a complete newbie at literature. In terms of completion of significant fictional works, I've only ever read A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho (movie guy here)

Do you think this book would be too much for me to handle, or do you think it's a good way for me to get my feet wet?

>>5965658
I also never said this was a long conversation.

>>5965726
A post modernist

>>5965658
the important thing to realize is that there are a lot of borrowed themes that DFW is balancing in IJ. You assumed that the paralysis was the key one, I'm just sayin there are more, and there is more to them than whatever it is youve been trying to say

>>5965745
read his short stories first. Start with consider the lobster.

>>5964376
Tried to read it over the summer. Got about halfway through but ended up getting behind on my school work and I ended up just sort of losing focus on it. I'd love to start over with it soon, maybe this summer, if I get some time off from school.

>>5964376
Bought it yesterday. Read Egger's intro, and now on page 40. Loving it so far. Smoking a fucking ounce of pot a day?? C'mon... impossible.

Got it for xmas, 200 pages in, I like it.

I also heard that everything gets bit tense way deeper into the whole thing, so... can't wait.

>>5965773

I'd correct that to "read his essays" first.

His fiction is...problematic. I have friends who like it, but I think they'd choose to like anything that wasn't fun to read. His essays are interesting and well written.

>>5965599
>>5965632
Side note, JOI runs Poor Yorick entertainment

>>5967928
I completely disagree. DFW's essays are very inconsistent. His compulsive, scatterbrained writing style lends itself to artistic flair but not coherence. Often times his essays begin with general rambling and ranting until somewhere 3/4 of the way through the text where he pulls out some half-assed thesis that has little to do with what he was just talking about. Moreover, his whole footnote style is absolutely infuriating in the context of an argumentative essay. Try reading his essay on prescriptive v. descriptive grammar - there are so many tangents and side arguments contained in the footnotes that the argument itself is distorted.

>>5965745
I agree with the guy who said essays first. Pick up A Supposedly Fun Thing I Never Want to Do Again, and if you like that, try Infinite Jest.

>>5965411
>>5965422
>>5965433
>>5965500
>>5965522
>>5965533
>>5965544
>>5965588
>>5965599
>>5965755
>>5965777

>>5964589

dis nigga from da moon

>>5964387
>>5965416
>Judging something from other people reaction
>Afraid to think self so just follows the cool people
>Plebs

>>5964376

For sale: Infinite Jest, never read.

Tried to read it, didn't feel interested so I dropped it and read some Asimov instead.

>>5968622
check'd.

>tfw spent 50 dollarydoos on this and haven't even touched it since
best 50 american currency i have ever spent

>>5968793
you got an extra copy? put it on amazon or something

>>5969123

Pretty sure he was lampooning the Hemingway short story.

>>5969100
what wtf, was it a hardback with literal gold decking sold at b&n on the day of release or what

50 bucks? what?

>>5967943
and his movie is called "infinite jest"
gj retard

>>5969176
shipping included
it was the first edition by little, brown and company
33rd print or so

>>5964376
I've read a fair amount of his Essay's, which I recommend reading before IJ. To be honest I simply haven't had enough free time yet to dig in to it, but will hopefully read it within the next 5 years...

I'm up to page 567, started just before Christmas. I should probably get off of 4chan soon and read more, if I want to be finished before the semester starts...

It's not nearly as difficult as it's hyped to be. It reminds me a lot of Catch-22. (I hear that Pynchon is a better point of reference, but I haven't read him yet. I'm not that well-read, at least not to /lit/'s *standards*.) They share zany, absurdist humor; non-linearity, an episodic experience; lots of distinct characters. Infinite Jest is just longer, more erudite, and deals with different themes (duh).

Here are what I think are the major difficulties, and how I've dealt with them (no spoilers, aside from some names):

1. Length. This is the obvious one. When I heard stuff like "A plot doesn't start to kick in until around page 200," I thought people were being dense. They're not lying. The book is very enjoyable up until that point, however. The wit carries it along. My favorite early sequences were Erdedy's and Don Gately's; I was hooked by Kate Gompert's first apperance, and Gerhardt's speech to Mario. At no point yet have I wanted to give up the book, but I have slowed my pace the last two days.
2. Language. This was the most frustrating thing for me, because Wallace loves arcane, Latin-ite English vocabulary. The Infinite Jest wiki has helped me for most instances, but it's incomplete in a lot of spots. The internet has tons of other pages dedicated to his vocabulary and neologisms, so I don't think buying a reader's guide is necessary. ALSO: Most of the sections (so far) are written in a third-person mixed-stream-of-consciousness. For example: some sections' prose has the characteristics of Wallace's eruditeness and observations, as well as the clunky English sentence structuring of a non-native speaker. I love this technique, but it can be jarring to some, or simply seem obnoxious. In a few other parts, he simply resorts for first-person stream-of-consciousness from the POV of lower-class, uneducated characters. It's not that difficult to interpret what's being said if you just stick with it.
3. Characters. There's a lot, and it's not always immediately obvious whether they'll became a major character, stay a side character, or be a passing reference. (Endnote 24 is a good example of this, in terms of plot also.) Sometimes you won't see a character in focus for (literally) more than a hundred pages. Same rule applies to some scenes, or plot threads. Just trust the author.
4. Timeline. Since I was taking notes throughout, I had the timeline worked out around, oh, page 150, I think. It's not all that essential, because the majority of the novel's sections (at least so far) take place within a small part of a certain Year.

(1/?)

Dunno.
I'm at page 800, 2 months in this, probably will finish in 10 days or less

>>5969702
I'd recommend first reading one of Wallace's essay collections, 'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' or 'Consider the Lobster', to know if you like his style, although IMO he is a lot more refined in his essays than Infinite Jest (not so much "And but so but" etc. -- I get how it mimics actual human rambling and mania, but I still don't really care for it. ALSO: My other big complain is there should have been more discresion between what got put into endnotes and what didn't. I think there should have been more parts of the narrative put into the endnotes, is my point. Or unconventional narrative stuff, like Hal's essays, the emails, yada yada...).

I guess I should also specify how I've been notetaking. I take notes on each 'section', that is before and after a line break. (No idea what the circles mean yet, but I have a hunch...) I write down all the characters (whether 'Main' or 'Mentioned' -- I can explain this distinction further if someone wants me to), and then every once in a while transfer those to a master list of characters I've got going. I also jot down a few sentences on what each section contains in terms of plot, just so I can go back and re-read if I feel I've overlooked some crucial character/plot-point. (I don't feel like using one of the scene guides online -- I've done just fine on my own.)

(2/2)

You Americans and your encyclopaedic door stoppers. Do you know who else has encyclopaedic knowledge? A writer of encyclopaedias.

>>5964376
Made it about 250 pages through.

Dude is an atrocious writer, boring thinker. Sometimes moderately funny.

>>5969702
>3 weeks into the book
>page 567
holy shit u read fast, i'm not a native english speaker so i probably take 30-40 pages an hour, how much u make?

>>5969755
w8 until u see pemulis getting kicked out as endnote, i loved the book, but that was frustrating

Read it once.
Listened to the audiobook twice.

>>5964376

I've started it, I have not finished it though. I'm not ready for it and it will be a awhile before I am, just as the foreword suggests.

>>5969778
I'm on break from school until Monday, I don't think I'll be finished before then however. I've been spending most of my free time reading, at a pace probably same as you, 30-40 pages per hour (combined with the notetaking too). It really is a page-turner though, which is why I've stayed with it this long. It's easy and fun to get lost in it.

>>5969793
Christ, thanks for the spoilers Anon. (Although I all but knew it was about to happen, poor Peemster...)

I don't see myself reading it. Sounds pretentious (dictionary definition, not 4chan definition) and smug from what I hear

Might reconsider when I'm done with books I actually want to read first

What I really liked about the book is toward the end like 850+ the plot gets pretty tense and has been rolling along pretty consistently (unlike the first 200 pages) and made me really want to know what was happening with Hal and Gately.

Then boom he winds down the novel the same way he wound it up with new bullshit about unimportant side characters and then it ends and you have to piece it together.

Genius level troll by leading into that with a thousand pages.

I finished. It's not a fucking accomplishment. Still a fun read.

>>5969778
>>3 weeks into the book
>>page 567
>holy shit u read fast
dude 567 pages over three weeks amounts to 27 pages per day.

>>5964376
Read it, loved it.

>>5970581
>>5970581

what? the first 200 pages are pretty consistent.

Hal
Druggie
Hal
ETA
Druggie
Digression
Hal
etc

>>5971651
No, he was saying that about the plot rolling along. The first 200 pgs was pretty slow, then it builds and gets intense as fuck until like 800, then just winds down again

Then about an hour after finishing it it hits you

>>5964376
ive started it
ive finished it
i liked the footnotes, both for their content and as a stylistic tool

>>5971805
What hits you?

>>5971886

dfw

>>5971886
I assume "the point" or maybe more accurately "the joke"

>>5971886
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
A
V
I
D

F
O
S
T
E
R

W
A
L
L
A
C
E

I got it for Christmas but haven't had time to start it
Too busy writing bad essays about Shakespeare

>>5964376
I read IJ in August and September 2014 because some assholes on a different website started a 'reading group' and chose IJ as the first book. Of course I was the only person who read it.

Were Orin and Avril fucking?

>>5972352
Yeah that's the implication, also heavily implied that ct is Marios father because his mother had the same heridatory condition and Avril isn't directly related to her

>>5964376
I got half-way through. Though this less of an indication to the quality of the book than the length of my attention span.

>>5972471
so incestuous...

I love it

>>5964376
>begin this book yesterday
>reach the top of page 84 ("Schtitt's thrust...)
>the paragraph is the most beautiful thing I've read
>it's about tennis
>what am I feeling?

>>5972488
the first 280ish pages have some really wonderful parts (probably more but I read the remainder over a long period so I can't really pick anything in paritcular out), my favourite was probably the very opening where Hal is trying to explain that he has written those essays himself and that he is still cognizant even though he's almost speaking in tongues, or when Himself is in disguise and talking to Hal about his life

>>5964441
>thought.
Good to see a mature person on the board.

>>5965411
>>5965453
Fucking Aristotle had this shit figured out why niggas still confused about it?

>>5965533
Dude, nobody got all that shit the first read through. You'd have to comb the book pretty thoroughly on your second read through to figure a lot of that shit out.

>>5969851

fool. of course it would seem 'smug,' it's a thousand fucking pages of dense fiction. You honestly think people would actively read and discuss a book for almost twenty years if it was smug and pretentious? Let's look, since you mentioned it, at the dictionary definition of 'pretentious'
attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed
no shit. you think it's some spiritual journey when really DFW merely wrote a unique story that has fractured narrative and a high pagecount

>>5972471

I'm re-reading it now and I picked up on that relationship (orin+the moms) a little more just from Orin's first appearance. Orin wakes up every day drenched in the fetal position (like a newborn) after sex that he seems to enjoy for medical purposes..he also is haunted by a dream where he and Avril are stitched face to face....

>>5964376
I've owned the thing for over a year but there is so much other stuff I haven't read yet that it just seems like a waste of time.

I read it over the course of 3 months. My mom had just died, so it kept me occupied.

>>5965533
>Every IJ thread forever because so many vacuous cunts didn't get the book
>implying 'getting' the 'plot' is in any way a valuable experience
>implying the plot isn't shit anyway, extremely contrived, all sorts of mental faculties have to be suspended, it only serves as a ham-handed combination of inane personal opinion and utterly pointless, overthought 'construction' of the novel

>>5965533
>DFW: [...] parallel lines are supposed to start converging [...]
nice catachresis, asshole. this triggers my autism.

>>5976274
Funny how things like that likely would have bothered DFW himself, but he makes the same errors.

>>5976425
>>5976274
It's actually a common infraction among SNOOT stylists, apparently. See: The Phenomenology of Error by Joseph M. Williams.
That is an interesting error, since the Lenz chapters are full of (intentional, and hilariously so) catachresis (catachreses?).