A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
by David Foster Wallace
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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
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Read in February, 2008
I'd like to give this book more stars, but just can't. It's funny, engaging, full of zany language use and insights into the modern life. The essay on postmodern fiction's connection to television is mind blowing, totally worth the price of admission and worth checking out even if you don't read this book, as is the David Lynch essays. As for the rest...
I just got tired of his voice. It's similar to when you read too much Phillip Roth or watch too many Woody Allen films - you get trapped in ...more
I just got tired of his voice. It's similar to when you read too much Phillip Roth or watch too many Woody Allen films - you get trapped in ...more
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Read in November, 2007
Once again, I'm touched, awed, and forced to think by David Foster Wallace. Here is an author who is thoroughly "modern" who understands what it is to be alive now, yet still is able to make me seriously reconsider my point of view and thought processes. This book of essays includes impressions on a 7 night cruise, the point of David Lynch movies, and an Illinois state fair. Also includes some essays about tennis that were even enjoyable to me. What a smart, perceptive, funny, slig...more
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Read in January, 1998
Only two of the essays are what you'd call enjoyable: "Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All," if that's the actual title (I may have switched some words in there) and the titular essay. Titular! Hee. That sounds dirty. Anyway, those two essays are great, and the last one will help you if you feel you need to look down on friends/parents/parents' friends who go on cruises. If David Foster Wallace says cruises are for middlebrow bourgeois assholes, then by God it ...more
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i read this one a few years back and enjoyed it well enough but not well enough to think much more about david foster wallace -- until, recently, i was given a free copy of his newer essay collection "consider the lobster", which i loved so much that i embarked on a reread of this earlier essay collection. i liked it better this time. i still found some of the arcane essays hard to get through, and overall far less readable than the arcane essays in "consider the lobster" -- ...more
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Read in July, 2006
recommends it for:
DFW fans; Sedaris fans that want to branch out
A worthy read on more levels than we have fingers and toes to offer. I’ve been a tremendous fan of Wallace’s fiction (”found drama” duh!) now for about five years and was more or less commanded by a good friend to check out this collection of essays. Several of them floored me. A few others I was “eh” about. His humor shines through in damn near all of these essays and in ways that are both easy to appreciate if you’re literate. “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Away from It...more
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Read in November, 2007
recommends it for:
everyone
incredibly high quality is sustained throughout. many, many extended five-star chunks with just enough sprinkled clunky moments to deny it the coveted Overall Five-star Rating.
so good, really, that i can't even choose either a best or a worst essay from the bunch. the best stuff is his humorous description that is also very detailed and therefore highly informative, about things he doesn't already know everything about, which thus works best in the essays describing the illinois state fa...more
so good, really, that i can't even choose either a best or a worst essay from the bunch. the best stuff is his humorous description that is also very detailed and therefore highly informative, about things he doesn't already know everything about, which thus works best in the essays describing the illinois state fa...more
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Read in June, 2008
David Foster Wallace earns a LOT of points in my book for making me read not one, but TWO essays on tennis and actually enjoy them. That's something special.
He's also flipping brilliant. The kind of smart that makes me want to just sit back and marvel, actually. I enjoyed this whole collection bunches but even if I hadn't - the essay on television would have been worth the entire book. It's perspective shifting stuff, really. After I read it, I wanted to share it with everyone - from you, my...more
He's also flipping brilliant. The kind of smart that makes me want to just sit back and marvel, actually. I enjoyed this whole collection bunches but even if I hadn't - the essay on television would have been worth the entire book. It's perspective shifting stuff, really. After I read it, I wanted to share it with everyone - from you, my...more
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Read in January, 2008
This is somewhat highbrow humor that's not so self-consciously erudite it makes you want to kill the author. The compilation features several academic essays that are worthy reads if you're interested in David Lynch movies, postmodern cultural analyses, and literary criticism (or just want to hone and enhance your vocabulary; but he's not obnoxious about his obscure wordings. He's having too much fun to be that uptight.) There are several standout essays that caused chuckles, then chortles, ...more
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Read in April, 2008
Wallace is funny and smart in the way that a good social critic should be. Some components of his style wear thin after a while (I found myself wondering if he was trying for some kind of character-count record for his footnotes.) And I caught a small error (capitalizing a specific epithet?) that made me question his authority a little (could have been his editor, I don't know if future editions were corrected.)
The Illinois State Fair essay was my favorite. My parents live way out in the sti...more
The Illinois State Fair essay was my favorite. My parents live way out in the sti...more
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Read in July, 1997
One of the reasons I write. Really turned me on the possibilities of a naturally rangy, engaging, humorous, insightful voice . . . I just read Tolstoy's definition of art as, in part, being necessarily able to *infect* the reader with an emotion or mental state, and this book totally fulfills that jawn. I always compare DFW to AI (Allen Iverson), in that after I watched every Sixers game in the winter of 1998, my game improved tremendously in the spring: I could suddenly dribble and move more ef...more
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Contents:
Three staggeringly brillant, laugh out loud funny, and philosophically profound essays that easily justify the entire book. Subjects: The Indiana State Fair, Mid-Level Tennis Pro Michael Joyce, and a high-end luxury cruise. Essential.
Long piece on David Lynch's career and its larger significance circa "Lost Highway" is also excellent if occasionally marred by overuse of the word "creepy."
Personal reflection on midwestern tennis and wind vectors is much...more
Three staggeringly brillant, laugh out loud funny, and philosophically profound essays that easily justify the entire book. Subjects: The Indiana State Fair, Mid-Level Tennis Pro Michael Joyce, and a high-end luxury cruise. Essential.
Long piece on David Lynch's career and its larger significance circa "Lost Highway" is also excellent if occasionally marred by overuse of the word "creepy."
Personal reflection on midwestern tennis and wind vectors is much...more
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Read in April, 2008
recommends it for:
people who want to expand their vocabulary
You can tell how far DFW has come as a writer by reading Consider the Lobster first and this collection second (the essays here date back to the mid-90s). However, even tho these aren't nearly as refined as those in CtL, they are still very entertaining overall. The titular essay will probably make you hate the author (my crazed intellectual crush on him instantly dissolved after reading this one), but the one on David Lynch is absolutely requisite for any DL fan, and the one on television is ...more
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Read in February, 2008
I couldn't resist the title, and the titular essay is pretty funny. I've never read anything of his before, though I have to admit I've been curious about "Infinite Jest" for a few years. But I'm always put off by these "Allow Me To Illustrate for You the Wealth of My Intelligence" types, which is where I've categorized Wallace.
Anyway, the essay is about a luxury cruise taken by the author, what he terms a "7NC" - seven nights Caribbean. The digressions and...more
Anyway, the essay is about a luxury cruise taken by the author, what he terms a "7NC" - seven nights Caribbean. The digressions and...more
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Finally read most of this, though I skimmed/skipped the two essays pertaining to literary critique, because they embodied the things that I hate most about Wallace’s writing: 1. the guy needs a motherfucking editor! he’s so long-winded and takes forever to say the simplest things, invariably using a bunch of obscure/foreign language to do so, which leads me to number 2. he’s so motherfucking pretentious, and so obviously angling to look like the cleverest boy in school, it’s maddening! ...more
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Read in March, 2008
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 you sort...more
Also you sort...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommended to Margaret by:
Aaron, Thomas and Karen
You can never go into the movies, or a book, with too high of expectations. Recently, while in the backseat of a honda just about to exit I84 en route to a day of sightseeing in Hartford, I was regaled for what was probably about a minute and a half, but felt like three and a half minutes, about how amazing DFW is, what a genius, how his annotated and parenthetical style of writing is secretly influencing the entire generation of writers my age (what about Nabokov and Salinger, I was wondering ...more
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Read in June, 2007
3.5. I never finished this, and I've got mixed feelings. I absolutely loved the title essay, which was brilliant, thoughtful, and hilarious. But then I went back to the beginning and started the first two essays, which had their moments of amazingness, but were also really, really heavy in a way my brain did not want to handle -- especially for pleasure/summer reading -- and so I stopped, b/c I was tired of thinking so much. It's possible that I'm just kind of stupid, but I think that sometimes ...more
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This collection of essays sat on my bookshelf unopened for a year and just intimidated me. I'd never read anything by David Foster Wallace before, but had heard rumors about the agony of trying to make it through Infinite Jest. But I finally picked it off my bookshelf and was blown away by the 50 page (or more?) essay all about David Foster Wallace's experience on a luxury cruise. His foot notes alone made me love him... he writes these long winded, multiple-page foot notes describing the minute...more
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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.
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