Infinite Jest
This morning marked a monumental milestone: not the celebration of a birthday or anniversary, not some significant career or life accomplishment — no, what happened today is that I finally finished reading David Foster Wallace's hefty masterwork, Infinite Jest.
To give you an idea how long I've been working on this, O wrote a blog post on January 6, 2007, a little over a year ago, about one section I'd run across at the time.
It's difficult to read a book that long without it becoming a part of your life a little. I've read other books in the meantime (nearly a dozen, I believe), both to give myself an occasional break from Infinite Jest's cerebral requirements, and also because it's just too darn heavy to lug around most places, but I always came back to it, and my marriage and friendships have been peppered with references to feral hamsters, Quebec separatist terrorist wheelchair assassins, subsidized year names, and anally inserted toothbrushes almost as long as I can remember.
I've been spending much of the day debating how it ranks up against my two favourite books: David Foster Wallace's other novel The Broom of the System, and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I'm not entirely certain.
Certainly the end of Infinite Jest sort of left me hanging, and there were plenty of long passages about youth tennis which were not my favourite reading by a long shot, but on the other hand, compared to such a sprawling immersive world, the others seem a bit like a sitcom episode competing against a feature length film: to favour the film seems unfair, but to favour the sitcom seems a little cheap.
To compete on those terms, it's definitely my favourite novel I've read above 400,000 words, but there's not exactly a lot of competition in that category.
At any rate, it's done, and now I have to start moving on.
Unless the temptation really does win me over to loop back around to the beginning to figure out what Hal ate to make him lose his mind.
To give you an idea how long I've been working on this, O wrote a blog post on January 6, 2007, a little over a year ago, about one section I'd run across at the time.
It's difficult to read a book that long without it becoming a part of your life a little. I've read other books in the meantime (nearly a dozen, I believe), both to give myself an occasional break from Infinite Jest's cerebral requirements, and also because it's just too darn heavy to lug around most places, but I always came back to it, and my marriage and friendships have been peppered with references to feral hamsters, Quebec separatist terrorist wheelchair assassins, subsidized year names, and anally inserted toothbrushes almost as long as I can remember.
I've been spending much of the day debating how it ranks up against my two favourite books: David Foster Wallace's other novel The Broom of the System, and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and I'm not entirely certain.
Certainly the end of Infinite Jest sort of left me hanging, and there were plenty of long passages about youth tennis which were not my favourite reading by a long shot, but on the other hand, compared to such a sprawling immersive world, the others seem a bit like a sitcom episode competing against a feature length film: to favour the film seems unfair, but to favour the sitcom seems a little cheap.
To compete on those terms, it's definitely my favourite novel I've read above 400,000 words, but there's not exactly a lot of competition in that category.
At any rate, it's done, and now I have to start moving on.
Unless the temptation really does win me over to loop back around to the beginning to figure out what Hal ate to make him lose his mind.