Fred's review
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace
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" -- a fact i attribute to the growing humility that should (in my opinion) come with age and the author's realization that, perhaps, there are things he doesn't know so much about either, and that the reader, therefore, might be owed a gentler introduction to, say, the world of literary theory or linguistics as it pertains to english usage guides. so anyway, i had a few quibbles with the book, but in several of the essays, particularly the title one, i got just as much pleasure as i did from reading...more
