I'm taking the plunge. I'm going to dive into Infinite Jest this summer, along with a whole bunch of other bibliophiles. If I'm going to read it, this is the way to do it. Infinite Summer is sponsored by The Morning News, who brought us the Tournament of Books.
Last night, I began exercising the David Foster Wallace area of my brain by starting A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, an essay about a Caribbean cruise he took in order to write about it for Harper's. I'm twelve pages in, and already I've laughed out loud several times.
I expect Infinite Jest will be much different, being that it is fiction and over 1000 pages long (including footnotes/endnotes.) We'll see. I'm going to give it a try. My expectations for myself are not too high: See what it's like and enjoy the ride. Even if I determine IJ is not my style and decide to abandon it, I will learn a bit more about why DFW is so admired, and I will have discovered his essays, which already makes this endeavor more than worthwhile.
