James Roach > Recent Status Updates

Starting Lonelyache.

I think I was 10-15 pages into this when I stopped reading it, so I'm starting over.

I started reading this in the Winter 2024, but put it down after the ski season, I think.
I finished I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream - it was good, but has the unenviable position of inspiring a lot of sci-fi knock-offs over the years.
Big Sam Was My Friend - I don't remember what it was about.
Eyes of Dust and enjoyed it, though it was a little sad.
World of Myth - I did enjoy this. Suspenseful.

Today I completed the book. I started reading it again in either April or May and finally read the last word at the same place where I read so many pages in the last 4 years - Beachwood Swim Club.

Verdict: I don't know that the experience was worth the effort reading this thing for the last 4 years. It could be funny, it could be profound, but as a novel, I found it really hard to sum up what I had just read.

981 is the last page in the novel. Up to now, I've read all 286 footnotes, which covers an additional 70 pages. Pretty sure I've read all the end notes, too. There weren't many of those.

I found the pages on depression in pgs 692-698 to be very profound. It is no wonder at all to me that a man that understood depression as well as DFW did would end up offing himself.

Restarted my summer read. On the whole, the main character arcs are now well established: Hal and the kids at the tennis academy, the 2 spies hanging out in AZ smoking cigarrettes and arguing politics, and the characters at the substance abuse house. The arcs are rotated fairly evenly, though there is still no clear connection between them. They could easily be 3 novels at this point instead of 1.

In addition, there is a really great chapter between a U.S. and Quebec secret agents that argue over what motivates Americans and makes them uniquely American. I don't know if it actually answers the question, but it is thought provoking: 2 Americans deeply desire a single-serving can of bean soup, and each have an equal claim to the soup. How do you determine who gets it and who goes without?

The last 60 pages have been very interesting. There is an explanation of how the U.S. government sort of annexes Mexico and Canada called "Interdependence", and basically creates this an area in New York/New Hampshire as a huge garbage dump and then gives it as a territory to Canada sparking the main conflict between the two nations. Also how the entertainment industry changed into the interlace cartridges.

Have been in some long chapters about AA, and the humor (whether intentional or not) goes right off the cliff for me. This is a deep dive into AA meeting territory - how they are organized, how they are run, the different segments of alcoholics that are in attendance, etc. You can say a lot about DFW, but when he drills into a topic, he really goes deep down the rabbit hole.

This book is funny. Not always, but when it's funny, it's really funny. I like this passage a lot right now:

"...you make a big deal of how head-over-heels in love you are with your wife, how wonderful she is, the wife, how blue and clean the pilot-light of passion stills burns in the central heating system of your love for her..."

Just finished the long chapter on the nuclear war strategy game called Eschaton which features tennis balls as ICBM's played on a tennis court. Maybe it's because of the war in Ukraine and the daily rhetoric about nuclear holocaust, but I think this chapter would have been laugh out loud funny maybe 2 years ago or something. My reading progress does not count the many pages of footnotes and end notes I've read.

Finally cracked 300 pages!

After a long break, I'm back reading this impenetrable text. In a rare experience, I jammed through 30 pages in one sitting thanks to lots of hilarious dialogue between Orin and Hal. So many pages of exposition with really long sentences and unclear relevance to the main narrative, though nearly 300 pages in, I still cannot for sure tell you what this book is about.

200 pages in! Still some hilarious passages to be found. The narrative is still very much a jumble. I'd like to keep the momentum going, but I'm getting into Autumn now, and my reading tastes always change to straight up horror. We'll see how far I get before IJ goes back on the shelf for next year.

This book is not a page turner. It is a number of disjointed narratives that can be very jarring from one to the next. It seems that some of them are starting to coalesce together, but I'm still looking at them as separate. I can barely understand the druggie narrative [pgs. 128-135]. The narrative on videophones showed just how visionary DFW was - Facetime came out 3 years after his death[145-151].

Getting better. It's a jumble of different narratives that don't appear to relate. Some you care about, others you don't. Some are funny, some just seem absurd. Some you are curious about and you go for long times before returning to. The book is a challenge, and the payoff to complete it is unclear other than to be able to say "I read it...ehhh".

The % is probably higher because I've been reading the footnotes. I read about 8 pages of footnotes on the fictitious filmography of one of the characters. Blah. It is a slow going read. Unclear from one "chapter" to the next just what time period I am in.

Did not understand the chapter on the medical attache. Who is this person? How are they related to Hal?
Narrative skips around a lot in the first 40 pages. Hal is just a little kid now. No idea what happened to him after the first chapter where he had the episode during the college interview at the U of A.
Who is Wardine? What's her connection to the narrative?
Some chapters are really funny. A lot of confusion

New world record - I'm 4 more pages BEYOND where I left off the last time I started Infinite Jest. Ok - it is funny in a bizarre way. What is wrong w/ Hal?

Restarting Infinite Jest today!

Started this book today

It was an okay book. The character they focused on the most was not even hardly in the TV show and it just went on and on what central character they were. BORING! Hoping that the Final Dossier reads better - it's definitely shorter!

I think I finished the boring UFO stuff finally. BORING!!!!

Have now moved back into very boring UFO stories connected to Crowley and other satanic cults. When will I return to Twin Peaks????

Having fun reading about Ed and Norma.

It's starting to get a lot more interesting now that they are caught up with the history, and are now getting into the lives of the actual Twin Peaks characters.