While I don't actually have A Favorite Book (or Song, or Album, or Band, or Film, or Painting, or Sexual Position, or any other category of things that contain more than one equally great contender) Infinite Jest is the first book that immediately comes to mind when the idea of My Favorite Book arises.

As I've already alluded to and partially instantiated in a few scattered places around GoodReads, I feel that I read this book at the right time. The contingent particulars which culminated as the More...

I've finally reached the end of this amazing book. It's not an easy read, but after a while you discover that there are good reasons why it has to be the way it is.

The review is the mini-blog I kept while I was reading it. It sort of contains spoilers: I don't give away very much about the plot, but I do spend a lot of time speculating about what the overall point of the book is. So if that kind of thing bothers you, you probably shouldn't read on. Read Infinite Jest instead, then come back and More...

I've been waiting, panther-like, for the right combination of caffeine and personal gumption to strike, to attack writing about this, since it really is one of my favorite books ever-ever, and one of the most fascinating things I've ever read. I've read this book twice and I could care less what people say about it, because when I *do* care, I tend to grit my teeth over the ridiculous comments & reviews that tend to come up in discussing David Foster Wallace's work. People like to levy the c More...

Mulholland Drive (M.D.) is the movie that made me a David Lynch fan. Infinite Jest (I.J.) is the book that has made me a DFW fan. I mention this because the first time I saw M.D., I immediately rewatched it. Likewise for I.J. - as soon as I finished it, I flipped to the beginning and started again. This is a book so fractured in structure that it needs serious re-examination and puzzling over. M.D. and I.J. break up the story rather than direct telling, dropping clues and hints along the way. Th More...

the creative act is one born from the marriage of inspiration and perspiration; but as the former is a flighty bitch we really must rely on perspiration, eh? and boatloads of concentration. so gallons of coffee work as a kind of 'insperspiration' to my easily-influenced system: 1. it fights off the ADHD and focuses me (not to mention mucho perspiration), and 2. it offers an initial euphoria giving way to a kind of mindfuckededness which, for me, paves the road to inspiration. mindfucked art, at More...

DJ Ian's Sunday Evening "Tell Me What You Really Think"

You're listening to Radio KCRCR, "Tell Me What You Really Think", where we listen to the critics and you talk back. That's if there's any time left after I finish my rant. Hehe.

A lot of listeners ask me about my namesake. What about that other Ian Graye, you say. The one on GoodReads. What do you think of him? And what did you think of his recent review of David Foster Wallace's magnum opus?

Well, let me reassure you: that other Ian Graye is More...

And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.
And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.
And We said:
Look at that fucker Dance

Real life is a pain. Real life is a bitch. Real life slumps you together from a squiggly mess and shoots you out to a cold and unfeeling world, empty in mind and soul. So you scrounge around for meaning, whatever fulfills your personal definition of said meaning, eyes gaping for that next slice of indomitable thrills and chills, mouth pincering over a statue in r More...

There don’t appear to be enough reviews of Infinite Jest on Goodreads so I thought I’d go ahead and write another one.

Anyway, I kind of hated this book. I hated that its characters are essentially parodies of themselves which limited my ability to connect with them on any meaningful level. I hated the lack of linguistic nuance with which most of the characters speak, particularly given that the predominant speech pattern here is rife with superfluous clauses and multiple possessives, a pattern n More...

I should have hated this book. 1079 pages of small text with loooooonnnnggggg paragraphs and little white space so it feels like you’re reading a newspaper from 1881. Plus, 96 goddamn pages of endnotes. *1 The plot, such as it is, doesn’t really come into focus until several hundred pages into it, and even though it’s set in the near future where something very strange has happened in North America, this doesn’t get explained until about mid-way through the book so you’re left feeling confused a More...

It's my habit to write on the inside sleeve of a book the words from the text that I can't define or don't understand. Here is the resulting list from the back inside sleeve of Infinite Jest:

apocopes
bolections
reglets
dipsomania
quincunx
varicoceles
simpatico
aleatory
experialist
agnate
pedalferrous
fulvous
louvered
sangfroid
gibbons
apercu
eidetic
murated
tumescent
recidivism
erumpent
rutilant
hale
purled
nacelle
sulcus
imprecated
tumbrel
comportment
scopophobic
asperity
rapacious
afflatus
bathetic
brachiform
strabismic
ascapart More...

Know what they say about novels such as Infinite Jest: Don’t seek Perfection or Pleasure but rather seek the Infinite Possibilities.

I have a lot to say about this book but before that there’s a little I don’t want to say about it. Here it is:

☽This book is never ending.

☽It bored me at times too.

☽Some of the end notes were annoying.

☽At times I read other books when I was supposed to read this book.

☽Whenever somebody asked me what IJ was all about, I was unable to come up with a clear-cut answer.

☽I More...

I feel like I just ran head-on into the brick wall that is Infinite Jest, and my head isn't quite clear enough to figure out what I thought yet.

I mean, it was a slow-motion run, given that I started this back in December and read it very, very slowly. I've taken a lot of time to think about it. Why don't I know what I think?

I enjoyed most of it a great deal. I liked every individual storyline. I appreciated the characters, and the varieties of writing style, and the footnotes, and the sheer inve More...

100 Words in Search of Precision

In the spirit of "Star Trek”, DFW boldly wanders through the darkness of the modern world, holding a candle, recording everything he witnesses in minute, almost helmet-cam detail.

He isn’t just preoccupied by or satisfied with the absurdity and comic potential of the world.

He wants to scrutinise it, diagnose it and cure it.

Out of the minutiae comes meaning and illumination.

It’s up to the reader to sift through the minutiae, to discard the mullock and the fool’s gol More...

By the time I hit third grade and had still demonstrated absolutely no inclination toward athletic pursuits, my parents forced me into the township's local softball league. Because that's what you do when your bookworm daughter begs to take art lessons and possesses a nigh prodigious talent for falling up stairs, right? My first year of being a young ball player was punctuated by lots of praying for rain, daydreaming in the outfield and swinging at every pitch just because I liked how it felt: S More...

In his 1967 postmodernist primer The Literature of Exhaustion, John Barth says: “A labyrinth . . . is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice are embodied and . . . must be exhausted before one reaches the heart.”

Thirty years later, as postmodernism twitches through its death throes, DFW publishes the labyrinthine Infinite Jest, where all possibilities are exhausted while shattering the heart. The novel is structured around a Sierpinski Gasket, a complex series of triangles mu More...

I have written a more substantial but no more real review than the little blurb that used to sit here. The original blurb written on the day I heard DFW died follows this lengthy and self-indulgent exercise.

Within a year of each other two works of entertainment were released that have been pretty darn influential to me. One is this book, and the other was Jawbreaker's album Dear You. Both are relatively polarizing works, people either seem to love it or hate it*.

Jawbreaker's album was a momento More...

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln decided that the fourth Thursday of each November would be recognized nationally as Thanksgiving. Today happens to be the fourth Thursday in November. Happy Thanksgiving.

I would like to give thanks to the fact that I finished this mother-effing book today.




It's now 9:40 EST as I start to write this review. I finished reading approximately five hours ago. Since then I have polished off almost an entire bottle of Chardonnay. It's taken me this long to a) get a nice enough bu More...

Inelegant Brevity
Upon finishing this tome, I held it clutched between my victorious hands and shook the 1000 page-plus behemoth over my head, making some atavistic, phlemish noises from deep within my chest. It had been two months of struggling through a seemingly impenetrable wall of prose and esoteric jargon. DFW has quite the hankering for specialized knowledge, inside vernacular, nicknames, neologisms, innitialisms and acronyms. Couple that with 100+ pages of endnotes and this makes for a he More...

I've picked up and put down this novel so many times over the last couple of years that I now have arms like Charles Atlas [seriously, I could take you all in an arm wrestle; these biceps, baby, are bulging], and this see-sawing between reading and not-reading clearly indicates an attitude of ambivalence.

I’m enjoying it
I’m not enjoying it
I’m enjoying it
I’m not enjoying it

...like picking pretty petals from a flower.

My mother taught me that if you’re going to, oh I don’t know, call someone an idi More...

You Look Like You Could Use a Cold One: or How to Prepare a Glass of Coca-Cola® with Ice

Items needed:

1 - 8 oz. glass*

1 - 12 oz. can of Coca-Cola®*

1 - cube of ice*
____

(* or to taste)

I'm so bored I've even stopped wondering why ppl like it. Im so bored I dont even care why they all give it 5 stars. I'm so bored I don't even slam the book closed any more, I sleepily and nonchalantly place it back on the shelf and pretend it never happened. -- Mary R.

Tennis. Tennis. Tennis. Tennis. Tennis. Tenni More...

Dang! I didn't see this coming. I hadn't expected to be giving up on Infinite Jest out of boredom, of all things. I mean I have seen people mention its length, its complex structure, non-linear timeline and all of that, but I don't hear people talking about how boring this can get. We know the kind of reputation Infinite Jest and Wallace enjoy on Goodreads. I can't think of another book which has elicited reviews as passionate and personal as this one does. I feel any one of those reviews has mo More...

When I started thinking about this book yesterday after I finished it. I mostly thought about it in my own head, my experience of the book and my understanding of the book. I don’t think this was wrong. I don’t think it was wrong when it was recommended that I quit reading the book in a status update I declined the invitation. I don’t think that It is reasonable to assume for any reason that everyone will like this book, or that there is even something fundamentally wrong with some or some’s rea

More...

A few days ago I was reading this at the gym while on the elliptical, sweating copiously, and a girl yelled at me from across the room "how do you even keep your place in that book?", to which I responded, "I use three bookmarks: one for where I'm actually reading in the text, one in the place where it explains the chronology of the book, and one in the endnotes." Her method was to buy two copies of the book and keep one open to the main body of the text and one open to the footnotes. Anyway, wh More...

1 JANUARY,NEW YEAR’S DAY 2013,THE YEAR OF MARCEL PROUST

Today I fell upon a realisation while reading Proust’s first volume of In Search Of Lost Time, Sawnn’s Way - Infinite Jest and In Search Of Lost Time are similar in their overwhelming, euphoric and encyclopedic trawl through human consciousness:

Infinite Jest is an entire universe of a book formed of head-bendingly-encyclopedic magnitudes of ideas and detail. There is a core to this universe of ideas -of literature, mathematics, philosophy, c More...

So, so far....


I know what I weigh. I brush my teeth, paint my toes, wash my hair. I dress up my tote of skin as best I can. I do all this, spend all this time on my outside because I care about what other people think and see and smell and hear about me. But the real me, the unique substance that resides inside my skin and bones and fluids, that many call a soul, doesn’t get the same treatment. And it should. It really should.
It is so much more important than my freckled flesh. But I don’t know More...

Heart-breaking, hilarious, and ultimately all-too-human.

Infinite Jest is a mammoth slice of American pie, tipping the scales at 1079 pages, including 388 endnotes. Some of the endnotes have footnotes, too. A book of these proportions is bound to have its nay-sayers, from people who believe verbosity to be a sin akin to gluttony, to those who got lost somewhere in the mid-500s and never found their way out.

I had some reservations; I'd heard the book was overwritten, overclever, overconfident, and More...

No review today. Just a short ramble:

I don't know a thing about the best book ever written because, shockingly, I haven't read every book ever written. (Yet!) That said, this is by far the best book that little ol' me has ever read. Definitely take my opinion with a grain of salt being that I don't know everything, but still take it. This novel is a more than worthwhile investment of absurd amounts of time and focused attention, and that is putting it mildly on all accounts.

5 (million) stars. More...

Infinite Jest is about suicide, which gets mentioned 56 times, or about once every 20 pages. So it's tempting, given that - spoiler - Wallace totally demapped himself, to see it as a suicide note. But it's about all this other shit too, right? Addiction, and mothers, and the weight of potential, and assassins in wheelchairs, and tennis. If Wallace had suddenly become a tennis star instead of dead we would look back on this book and be like man...we should have seen that coming. That shit was all More...

Update 5/7...Man, I don't know if I can write this. Here is one thought I don't think I've seen before: a rationale for the cloud design on the cover:

(p. 509) "And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper . . . No one's sure what C.T.'s choice of wallpaper is supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to scout More...

That's it, I'm demoting this one back to the TO-READ shelf - my pal Nick recently said he's changed the status of some intended time-consuming jobs from "when I retire" to "when I'm reincarnated" - maybe I'll read IJ in the next life, although as I intend to be a mighty elm tree in my next life that may prove difficult, but maybe you don't get to choose what you are, you just line up like at the bank or the post office and you go to a middle aged woman behind a wire mesh and she says "Okay honey More...