/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2679899]

I have been lent a copy of Infinite Jest. I had a little flick through and have been using it to bench press for a few months, but have finally plucked up the courage to read it.

Is it really worth the month long investment, and how much does the tennis dominate the book because I really hate tennis?

[Benny Profane !!muO1YE/mn/J No.2679930]

>>2679899

I found it more than worth the investment. You'll have to see for yourself. Tennis is a pretty major part of the book, but don't let that sway you. I find tennis boring as well, but he uses the sport to illuminate some pretty interesting ideas about competition and drive. It's definitely a great book. Long, but great.

[Anonymous No.2679931]

>>2679899
http://scorpionofscofflaw.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/infinite-jest-and-why-you-should-read-it/

Doesn't sound like tennis plays too big a part( relatively speaking that is, ya know, since it's huge?)

[Anonymous No.2679974]

>Infinite Jest
>Dat pic
>dat file name
>mfw

[Anonymous No.2680055]

It's not really about tennis so much as it uses tennis as an illustration of absurd obsession, but, yeah, there's a lot of tennis in there.

[Anonymous No.2681431]

i'm on page 410. so far it's fucking great, and this is the kind of stuff i usually wouldn't appreciate at all, would even hate. i don't know whether that's because this book is a masterpiece or i'm just maturing or a reader, but that's my endorsement, for what little it's worth

my suggestion is to just set a manageable goal for what you think you can read in a day, and STICK TO IT, i'm usually a burst type reader but for this i set myself 25 pages a day and i can't imagine that i'd have lasted this long otherwise. and a little more advice, 25 pages might not seem like a lot, but sometimes the text will get fucking DENSE and there will be dozens of footnotes and sometimes the footnotes themselves will be like 10 pages long, and so but what you thought was only going to be twenty five easy pages turns into thirty five pages, and the sentences are drifting together, they're going on and on about some obscure subject that like doesn't quite fit in with the plot, running on, the sentences are, and like you really don't want to skip anything or let your eyes glaze over because if you're gonna read this then by god you're gonna read this right, and wasn't david foster wallace the sort of author who would sneak something in and then but so it ends up being very important later on, this sly little detail does, that you thought was irrelevant at first but then now you're really fucking confused like where did this guy who licks sweat come from?

[Anonymous No.2681434]

>>2681431

sorry, i've been dying to try that since i started reading, you'll have to excuse me haha
anyways yeah. my advice (besides that) is don't expect a great novel type story (e.g. great gatsby) so much as DFW using his characters as an excuse to talk about anything he feels like, whether it's tennis or drugs or why video conferencing will never be popular. what makes it worth reading is that it just so happens he's a fucking genius, which means all of these are not only insightful, but also funny as hell, and the icing on the cake is that (400 pages in, for me) all these little unrelated sandy bits that at first seemed like lint on a window screen are now starting to coalesce and though i can't quite see what it is yet, i can see that it's going to be something, something huge.

[Anonymous No.2681436]

it's wicked worthwhile -- just make sure you have two bookmarks on hand, one for the text and one for the endnotes

[Anonymous No.2681440]

There's a fucking shit-tonne of tennis in it, because DFW was a bourgeois little shit with essentially middle-class sensibilities and problems.

I hate tennis, and the focus on it within the book was, frankly, alienating to me. But I found DFW to be an essentially trivial and middle-brow writer generally, so YMMV.

[vitaminwater !!dxcuk0biVrp No.2681762]

i just picked this up at the library. the size of the book is a bit intimidating to me. it's been awhile since i read a book this long.