Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch. People die ha...
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Jan 22, 2012
Joshua Nomen-Mutatio
rated it: 
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 that then cul More...
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 that then cul More...
88 comments
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(119 people liked it)
Jan 10, 2008
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
erumpe More...
apocopes
bolections
reglets
dipsomania
quincunx
varicoceles
simpatico
aleatory
experialist
agnate
pedalferrous
fulvous
louvered
sangfroid
gibbons
apercu
eidetic
murated
tumescent
recidivism
erumpe More...
31 comments
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(204 people liked it)
Dec 20, 2010
brian
rated it:
as a child i had a very very hard time concentrating -- gradeschool was marked by severe fidgeting, bouncing around in my desk, calling out w/o raising my hand, asking to go to the bathroom many many times (lotsa detention, meetings b/t parents and teachers), which only grew in high school, at which time i was tossed out and forced to go to nightschool as i simply could not remain seated through a 43 minute class and would just -- much to my teacher's disbelief and classmate's delight -- stroll
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67 comments
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(46 people liked it)
Jan 20, 2012
Thomas
rated it:
I am so grateful that I read this book when I did. The world was a different place to me then. David Foster Wallace was alive, for one. I was just several months sober, for the second. Just a few months before I started reading Infinite Jest, I thought my life was over. I was on one side of an addiction and as far as I could see, there was no other side. I assumed I would die before I got clean. And then something happened that I never, ever thought would happen: I stopped doing drugs completely
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23 comments
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(52 people liked it)
Feb 24, 2011
Bird Brian
rated it:
Stick with it!
The ecstatic reviews of Infinite Jest on this site are not overblown. It’s as good as everybody says. There are so many enjoyable characters and quirky storylines, I couldn’t put the book down for the last three hundred pages. That said, I should warn prospective readers that it is a slow start. David Foster Wallace (DFW) dives in, and doesn’t initially tell you how everything is interrelated. Discovering those relationships is one of the many pleasures of this novel.
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The ecstatic reviews of Infinite Jest on this site are not overblown. It’s as good as everybody says. There are so many enjoyable characters and quirky storylines, I couldn’t put the book down for the last three hundred pages. That said, I should warn prospective readers that it is a slow start. David Foster Wallace (DFW) dives in, and doesn’t initially tell you how everything is interrelated. Discovering those relationships is one of the many pleasures of this novel.
More...
142 comments
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(49 people liked it)
Feb 01, 2008
David
rated it:
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 criti
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6 comments
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(70 people liked it)
Dec 07, 2010
Greg
rated it:
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*.
Jawb More...
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*.
Jawb More...
33 comments
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(50 people liked it)
Jan 06, 2010
Manny
rated it:
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 c More...
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 c More...
40 comments
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(57 people liked it)
Dec 05, 2010
Jasmine
rated it: 
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
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106 comments
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(23 people liked it)
Mar 23, 2011
Jen
rated it:
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 freckl More...
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 freckl More...
38 comments
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(37 people liked it)
Dec 16, 2009
Alex
rated it:
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, over More...
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, over More...
Jan 18, 2011
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
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34 comments
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(20 people liked it)
Jul 29, 2008
Tal
rated it:
It was a year ago, almost to the day.
I was sitting on the southeast corner of 54th & Park; the first day I worked with Simon, king crawdaddy of the axe slayers, hardhat in hand shining like an unpeeled orange in the sun. Opened up the book and page one was already impenetrable and confounding. Tried to read a couple pages and put it down--looked over at Sy, did a children’s puzzle book to hair metal bands. Two weeks of non-stop conversations with a guy I now barely talk to. Then I qu More...
I was sitting on the southeast corner of 54th & Park; the first day I worked with Simon, king crawdaddy of the axe slayers, hardhat in hand shining like an unpeeled orange in the sun. Opened up the book and page one was already impenetrable and confounding. Tried to read a couple pages and put it down--looked over at Sy, did a children’s puzzle book to hair metal bands. Two weeks of non-stop conversations with a guy I now barely talk to. Then I qu More...
6 comments
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(24 people liked it)
Aug 15, 2010
Tara
rated it: 
Infinite Jest is a symptom of something wrong in the literary world: is there nothing else out there with meaning people can find to adore? It's neither a work of genius, nor is it insightful. There are serious things wrong with this book. I think the bigger problem here is why anyone, anywhere, thinks this is brilliant. Somehow the advent of smarmy advertisement and sterile, banal corporate living over the past one hundred and fifty years has invaded our literature, and we think it's wonderful
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15 comments
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(24 people liked it)
Oct 04, 2007
Andy
rated it: 
I actually wrote and posted a review of David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest:
Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.
More...
Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. With its 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and its fondness for gags, drugs, cultural theory, recent US popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.
More...
8 comments
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(20 people liked it)
Jan 12, 2011
MJ
rated it:
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 More...
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 More...
65 comments
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(13 people liked it)
Dec 18, 2010
Kemper
rated it: 
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 confuse
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10 comments
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(26 people liked it)
Dec 17, 2009
Oren
rated it:
I want to give it zero stars.
This book is a giant pile of pretentious drivel. With a thousand pages and hundreds of endnotes (endnotes dammit! you need two bookmarks for this shit!) it's a book full of promises that are never delivered. By the end it feels like a practical joke has been perpetrated on you and the appropriate response is to punch the author in the face. Seriously, it would be a mild response. I feel that assaulting him blows to the head with a copy of the book would b More...
This book is a giant pile of pretentious drivel. With a thousand pages and hundreds of endnotes (endnotes dammit! you need two bookmarks for this shit!) it's a book full of promises that are never delivered. By the end it feels like a practical joke has been perpetrated on you and the appropriate response is to punch the author in the face. Seriously, it would be a mild response. I feel that assaulting him blows to the head with a copy of the book would b More...
Dec 17, 2009
Michael
rated it:
“I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium. There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” says David Foster Wallace in an interview with Salon.com. His sprawl
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0 comments
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(10 people liked it)
Dec 11, 2008
Matthew
rated it:
I started this book about a week after DFW died. I’d tried to read it about ten years ago, but I’d gotten frustrated with it, partly because I thought DFW was a showoff and possibly a douchebag, based solely (and stupidly) on the fact that he’d worn a bandana in his author photo in a bandana (I’d wondered WTF was he trying to prove—as if proving something was the only possible reason). This first attempt at IJ I’d only gotten about 300-some pages in and given up, thinking (because I really had n
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6 comments
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(18 people liked it)
Jun 22, 2009
karen
rated it:
this book...
i think it is time to write a proper review for this book, as it is one of my all-time favorites and deserves way more than two words. back when i was a junior in college, i was at the nyu bookstore, trying to sell back some textbooks before going away for winter break. the person in line in front of me was trying to sell back infinite jest (where was i when this class was being offered?? ) and of course, they werent taking it back because nyu is a stingy fucking school. More...
i think it is time to write a proper review for this book, as it is one of my all-time favorites and deserves way more than two words. back when i was a junior in college, i was at the nyu bookstore, trying to sell back some textbooks before going away for winter break. the person in line in front of me was trying to sell back infinite jest (where was i when this class was being offered?? ) and of course, they werent taking it back because nyu is a stingy fucking school. More...
106 comments
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(104 people liked it)
Dec 08, 2011
I'm ordinarily a pretty fast reader, so I imagined I would be able to knock this out in a week or two. Boy, was I wrong. And I have to say I've seldom been happier to be wrong. Infinite Jest is one of those books that takes time to get it's hooks fully into you, but when it does it's hard not to be completely in thrall to it. I'm not even sure it's a novel as much as it is a holistic intellectual commitment the way most German Philosophers and some long-running HBO television series are. I found
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Aug 21, 2007
Emirate
rated it:
If you read through online reviews of the book, Infinite Jest seems to have divided the fiction reading world largely into two camps: those that are in it (it="the reading of fiction") for the satisfaction that comes from having witnessed an author deftly tie together a narrative; and those that seem to be in it for the simple exposure to moments of humanity and new ideas (regardless of subject matter) (nuggets, if you will).
Normally, I kind of consider myself to straddle t More...
Normally, I kind of consider myself to straddle t More...
0 comments
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(7 people liked it)
Aug 22, 2011
Steve
rated it:
All David, All the Time
I suspect anyone who scales this mountainous tome will confess to some level of obsession for having done so. For me it took the form of extra reading time walking the sidewalks from the train to the office. I noticed I was given a wide berth when people saw the size of the prow coming their way. With such preoccupation you might imagine I was lost in the story, but it was more like getting lost in thoughts about the author himself. He and his sprawling int More...
I suspect anyone who scales this mountainous tome will confess to some level of obsession for having done so. For me it took the form of extra reading time walking the sidewalks from the train to the office. I noticed I was given a wide berth when people saw the size of the prow coming their way. With such preoccupation you might imagine I was lost in the story, but it was more like getting lost in thoughts about the author himself. He and his sprawling int More...
10 comments
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(13 people liked it)
Jun 23, 2009
Bram
rated it:
Take a look at the reviewer quotes on and within this book. Most of them extol DFW’s brilliance—as they should. He’s obviously brilliant; it oozes from the pages. And yet a writer’s intellectual fortitude does not a masterpiece make, and I’m not convinced that Infinite Jest is a faultless harnessing of the man’s genius (although is any book really?). That said, this novel is very, very good.
For some reason, I feel an overwhelming need to explain why I’m giving this book four st More...
For some reason, I feel an overwhelming need to explain why I’m giving this book four st More...
33 comments
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(34 people liked it)
Feb 15, 2010
David
rated it:
Hmm. I'm not sorry that I took the time to read this - parts of it were terrific. But other parts - huge, seemingly interminable, turgid undisciplined chunks - were frankly unforgivable. It's unfortunate that DFW's brilliance obviously intimidated his editor to a degree that did neither of them any favors.
There is a sort of arc that describes my reaction to the book - for about the first 150 pages or so, it was touch and go. Then things improved dramatically, and for the next 500 pa More...
There is a sort of arc that describes my reaction to the book - for about the first 150 pages or so, it was touch and go. Then things improved dramatically, and for the next 500 pa More...
16 comments
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(25 people liked it)
Dec 16, 2009
Nicholas
rated it:
Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace, is quite possibly the most dense and literate book I've read (of my own choice) thus far in my life (and keep in mind, I've read The Silmarillion.) But don't let that fool you: I loved it.
Obstenibly a "sci-fi" story (though not in any way I would say), Infinite Jest is about (alternately) a tennis academy, a drug/alcohol treatment house, avant-garde cinema, game theory, addiction, nationalism, love, abuse, damaged childhoods, More...
Obstenibly a "sci-fi" story (though not in any way I would say), Infinite Jest is about (alternately) a tennis academy, a drug/alcohol treatment house, avant-garde cinema, game theory, addiction, nationalism, love, abuse, damaged childhoods, More...
0 comments
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(3 people liked it)
Nov 08, 2007
Morgan
rated it:
Barrie recommended this book to me, but I swear, I must just not be smart enough to really get it. David Foster Wallace's style is reminiscent of Vonnegut who's listened to one too many vocabulary builder subliminal message tapes. He has scenes that are very interesting, but the book as a whole is like watching a Family Guy episode only instead of cutaway farting and penis jokes, there's drugs, crazy men who eat sweat, and a dysfunctional family who's obsessed with tennis.
If you're More...
If you're More...
0 comments
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(9 people liked it)
Feb 05, 2009
Weinz
rated it:
This book consumed my life for so long setting it down for the last time last night was like some post-coital sigh of exhaustion. I have carried it with me on planes, read through meals, ignored family and friends.
This book is brilliant and anyone that tells you otherwise ... well they should stick to Harry Potter.
I have all these questions still running in my head and putting them in print would lead to spoilers. So is this our future? Is this the path we are headed? Wh More...
This book is brilliant and anyone that tells you otherwise ... well they should stick to Harry Potter.
I have all these questions still running in my head and putting them in print would lead to spoilers. So is this our future? Is this the path we are headed? Wh More...
6 comments
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(11 people liked it)
Oct 31, 2009
From my comment on Cynthia Newberry Martin's wonderful lit-blog "Catching Days" http://catchingdays.cynthianewberrymarti...
The Infinite Summer read was my second time through this amazing book. First time was an enthralled but impatient sprint, much like Wendy Macleod describes in your quote above. This time I was able to slow down and savor his voice, as well as dash off to Wikipedia constantly to follow up on the multifarious references I wasn’t sharp enough to get w/o a little More...
The Infinite Summer read was my second time through this amazing book. First time was an enthralled but impatient sprint, much like Wendy Macleod describes in your quote above. This time I was able to slow down and savor his voice, as well as dash off to Wikipedia constantly to follow up on the multifarious references I wasn’t sharp enough to get w/o a little More...
0 comments
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(2 people liked it)
