Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Feb 15, 2011

oriana rated it:

before: I've been having trouble picking what to read next. I tried Anna Kavan, I tried William Vollmann, I tried Fellipe Alfau. No dice. So I thought maybe some non-fiction, something a little less frivolous, a little less difficult. I kinda pulled this book without thinking, really, refusing to consider myself one of the jumpers-on, someone needing desperately to reread an author right after his sudden, shocking death. I mean, I've read almost all his books before, right? So obvs I should be a More...

21 comments like (42 people liked it)

Jun 09, 2010

Bells rated it:

This summer I got this book from the library. I started on the cruise ship story and soon realized I would want my very own copy to dogear, underline, and do other dirty booknerd things to.

David Foster Wallace, you are (were) genius! I think I may be in love with you! I love your footnotes- footnotes that range from a simple "duh!" or "!" to 2 page long footnotes that have footnotes themselves. Not a lot of authors could get away with that, but you, my love, can More...

19 comments like (47 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

karen rated it:

this book made me wet myself. twice. i wish to god i was exxagerating. or elderly. but poor dfw on a cruise ship... no one has ever paired genius with social awkwardness more charmingly.

40 comments like (46 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2009

Matt rated it:

For some strange reason back in junior high school we were allowed a brief recess after lunch. The problem here is that there was very little to do during this recess. Here are the three activity choices that I remember:

1. Mill around on the concrete like inmates always do in "the yard" on those prison television shows.
2. Play a game that one of my fellow scholars evidentally invented that involved a mob of guys bouncing a tennis ball off of a wall and trying to nail More...

23 comments like (17 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

David rated it:

David Foster Wallace is one awesomely smart guy. This is both his greatest strength and his potential Achilles heel as a writer. Personally, I will read anything this man writes, because I think he is a true genius with a rare sense of compassion, and a hilarious sense of humor. Even when his writing falls victim to its own cleverness, I still find it worthwhile - perhaps because one senses that the writer is a true mensch (not something I feel when being dazzled by the cleverness of a Dave Egge More...

1 comment like (14 people liked it)

Apr 09, 2009

Lena rated it:

This collection of essays contains the two pieces that David Foster Wallace is probably best known for: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All," his observations on attending the Illinois State Fair, and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," his musings on a week-long Caribbean cruise. Both pieces are truly fantastic reading, entertaining, educational and brilliant all in the same breath.

Since I've often suspected that a mass mar More...

4 comments like (11 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2011

Chris rated it:

I'm bewitched by this glorious magenta cover with yellow starfish and the peculiarly flattened and shaped white font. I don't know why it is, but whenever I purchase the British edition of a book, inevitably I aesthetically prefer its differing cover artwork, layout, colour scheme, blurb text—the whole canoodle is just presented to this set of timeworn eyes in a more attractive package than what is offered from North American publishing houses. Not to mention that they generally even smell bette More...

3 comments like (8 people liked it)

Mar 03, 2010

Ellen rated it:

"a Kilroyishly surreal quality"

...I fell for DFW in the footnotes.

How was I to know? I don't read footnotes. When I edited a couple of books, I told the contributors, in draconian terms, that if the information wasn't important enough to include in their main text, delete the footnote; if it was, incorporate it into the main text.

Wallace puts many of his best lines, and a lot of himself, in his footnotes. They form a sort of counter-essa More...

77 comments like (16 people liked it)

May 16, 2010

Moira rated it:

Started rereading the titular (va-voom) essay to cheer myself up in migraine malaise. Dear God it's so fucking funny. Quite possibly the best essay ever. The spousal overunit moved into another room with his laptop to do homework because when I tried to read out sentence-paragraphs in acquiescence to the demand of 'What's so funny' I couldn't finish for giggling.

9 comments like (4 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Emily rated it:

the essay on tv and irony and fiction: brilliant.
the title essay: occasionally laugh-out-loud.
the two tennis essays: actually interesting to a non tennis player.
the illinois state fair essay: hilarious.
the essay about literary criticism/theory: completely confusing, but respectful.
overall, this book has made me into a DFW fan. he's SO articulate, his arguments are so well-developed, his way of thinking so unique. super captivating. i need to read more.

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2009

julieta rated it:

This is a totally enjoyable book where some of the essays talk about stuff that I would think I have no interest in, like tennis, or a cruise ship, but that are written so well I ended up laughing out loud at some points, something which I never ever do, I am usually the mute laughter sort of reader.

DFW is totally brilliant, I must confess that while reading him I always had my dicionary close by, thus adding new words to my vocabulary, while enjoying everything he writes about. It More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 14, 2011

Borbality rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 21, 2008

Steve rated it:

Judging from the traffic tie-ups you see, I’m not the only one who slows down to gape at a car crash. The temptation would be even greater somewhere like Beverly Hills with a Ferrari involved. I suppose reading this book would fall under a similar rubric: gawking at a star betided by tragedy.

By nearly all accounts, mine and the MacArthur’s included, DFW was a genius. This is all the more obvious given the essay format—-a good way to highlight his gift.* He saw big pictures, as h More...

4 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 26, 2011

Geoff rated it:

This, my first experience reading David Foster Wallace, disabused me of a few prejudices that in retrospect seem shamefully naive, one of which being that objects of the American Media Hype Machine are necessarily mediocre. I believed that there had to be something vapid or cheap or sensationalist about things or persons that become loci of the intellectual-creative “next-voice-of-our-generation” ballyhoo. It’s tough not to be cynical. The whole zeitgeist of our times is cynicism, aloofness, More...

32 comments like (9 people liked it)

Apr 13, 2009

Rachel rated it:

So guess what: I still like David Foster Wallace. Funny, serious, attention to detail - what more could I want of creative non-fiction? I didn't even know I was interested in post-modernism and modern television, or why David Lynch films (which I've never seen) are creepy, or what cruises say about American culture.

On Lynch: "I submit that we also, as a audience, really like the idea of secret and scandalous immoralities unearthed and dragged into the light and exposed. We like t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 25, 2008

Patrick rated it:

Somewhere I’ve heard it said that a good writer can write about anything and make it interesting. David Foster Wallace is such a writer, a good writer, and he does, at times, seem to write about anything. Although sometimes he seems to endlessly write about anything and then at the same time about everything else but the subject that he is supposedly writing about.

However, if I may be so bold as to make a small analogy here, most of the time he appears to be flogging a live horse un More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Jan 20, 2012

Joy rated it:

Oh- THAT'S what I've been missing out on. How many culture references have I missed by not having read this book? More importantly, Wallace is just a great writer- funny, subtle, graceful. All the essays are lovely, but the one on Television and U.S. fiction is amazing and, like, important (this is the one where he dissects what he calls the "tyranny of irony" in contemporary literary and televisual expression). Much like Murakami and the short story, it strikes me that Wallace is most More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 05, 2008

Paul rated it:

This is the kind of writing that makes you CUOL (crack up out loud) super hard, so that like three sentences later you remember the part that made you CUOL three sentences ago and you start CUOLing again, but so much that you can't just go on, you have to go and read that part over again that made you CUOL in the first place and then you just hold your place with your thumb and let the book fall closed and you shut your eyes and let yourself just CUOL for however long you need.

Also More...

1 comment like

Dec 17, 2009

Adam rated it:

I've read this collection of essays enough times to know them all pretty much by heart, but I know I'll end up reading it again in a month or two. Just too damned funny, in that typically condescending, snobby, over-educated and under-experienced DFW way.

Picture, if you will:

1) Country boy-turned-Effete East Coaster returns prodigally to the State Fair where he was born!

2) Same effete East Coaster goes on a cruise with the morbidly obese, the morbidly stupid, More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Sep 25, 2007

James rated it:

The eponymous essay is one of the funniest things I've ever read. I had it read to me for the first time while driving down the 95 in New Jersey. I literally had to pull off to the side because I was laughing so hard. He manages to be both critical and humane, existentially tortured (in a way I relate to) and culturally insightful (in a way I aspire to). My favorite line, after an exhaustive list of the various types of skin ailments and the like he has seen on the cruise: "In short, I ha More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 19, 2008

Maya rated it:

I was both in awe of and incredibly annoyed by how ridiculously smart David Foster Wallace shows himself to be in these essays. One reviewer described him as using words the way a ninja uses throwing stars. I guess it's a thing of beauty to see someone so adept and skilled, but it can also be irritating to a bystander, watching the words whiz by. And to top it all off, he was a ranked Junior level national tennis player. Ugh! Anyway, his essay on the cruise trip he took (the title essay) was rid More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 07, 2011

Pattie rated it:

What a wonderful, wonderful read. I've always always avoided DFW because I thought his writing would be difficult, dense and pedantic, but instead he's incredibly funny and honest and smart and readable. The essays are humorous without being snarky or superior or removed.

Although it's probably a different experience reading him now, after his suicide, as I imagine today's reader is be much more aware of the small, buried remarks that now appear as indicators of his deep pain and d More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 14, 2009

Herbie added it

It's the beginning of 2009 and I'm doing the same thing I was doing at the very beginning of 2008: obsessing over David Foster Wallace, re-reading and recovering from one of his books. But wherea Infinite Jest produced obsessive discontent, a feeling that something was wrong, that there was a chink in the book's "shiny" (as Dave Eggers calls Infinite Jest in the intro to the 10 year anniversary edition) armor, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again left me quite appreciative.
More...

0 comments like

Sep 23, 2011

Julia rated it:

"I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at whic More...

0 comments like

Sep 19, 2011

Brock rated it:

I can't read David Foster Wallace without feeling sad. Part of it is him; the fact that he's dead, and that he's not out there somewhere, squirreling away on another novel or essay or what-have-you. I feel about him the same way I feel about, say, Jim Morrisson: a profoundly talented person whose untimely death I regret for what are essentially selfish reasons. I'm sad that he's not here making good stuff for me to consume. That's not necessarily an honorable sadness, but there it is.

More...

0 comments like

Sep 13, 2011

Fabian rated it:

Dieses Buch wurde mir mit Enthusiasmus von Freund K. angetragen, der in diesen Fragen mein vollstes Vertrauen genießt. Allerdings war ich etwas erstaunt ob seiner Inhaltsangabe die sich ungefähr so anhörte: “Das ist so ein Typ der is Journalist oder sowas, der beobachtet so super, lies das mal das wird Dir gefallen. Der hat vom Harper Magazine so eine Luxus-Kreuzfahrt bezahlt bekommen die haben gesagt “Das was Du schreibst gefällt uns gut, mach da mal was wir zahlen die Reise”. Das Buch geht um More...

0 comments like

Sep 01, 2011

Calli rated it:

This was my first foray (besides his Kenyon College Commencement Speech in 2005) into David Foster Wallace’s writing. I started with “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” because there seemed to be some hype around it and the title rolled off the tongue well enough to merit the title of the collection of essays. The general impression I am left with, having gone through this piece, is that DFW seems like someone I would’ve wanted to know, but I probably wouldn’t have wanted him to know m More...

0 comments like

Aug 05, 2011

Greta rated it:

This book made me happy and sad. Happy because I loved reading it and it made me laugh out loud. Sad because there is no more David Foster Wallace. I loved this book because David uses words like "dork" and "scuzzier" and "scrotum-tightening" as well as words like "erumpent" and "sapropel" and "epicanthically". He also creates a lot of adjectives by using -ish at the end of a word. I like that. I also like the way he describes thi More...

0 comments like

Jul 10, 2011

Josh rated it:

I heard about David Foster Wallace on a Sports Guy podcast with Chuck Klosterman. Apparently, Klosterman thinks Wallace is out of his league. After reading this book, I am not sure of that. I think it's cute that Klosterman would think that somebody doing the same thing as he does with competence is a genius.

Wallace came first, though, and it is pretty easy to see that Klosterman was influenced by this guy. Wallace writes about mass culture events that are taken for granted and de More...

0 comments like

Jul 07, 2011

Adrian rated it:

I read two essays from this book: the one about going on a cruise and the one about television. Also I read the opening essay but it was not interesting. There were a couple others but I didn't get to them before I had to turn the book back in.

As a writer, he stretches my vocabulary. It's been a long time since I've been challenged like that. He also seems to be on the outside looking in at the rest of us, and that perspective was eye-opening. I appreciated his insight that the pe More...

0 comments like

reviews