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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on The Eternal Dissident.
I'm really locking into Infinite Jest, a work of unrealistic genius and prescience, so good that I don't even know what to say about it.
On audiobook I finished Two Weeks, Eight Seconds which was exactly what I wanted at the time that I wanted it. A perfect sports book.
In between I've been reading the Fort Bragg Cartel about drug running in the specops world in the South. It's good, but the author is just such a weenie. I'm antiwar as they come, but the book is so preachy about it when it is irrelevant to the action in the book.
The worst parts of Infinite Jest are:
footnotesendnotesStill haven't met a single person IRL who's finished it. Bummer.
@FtttG
This is my third or fourth attempt to read this book. In the past, I've gotten a few hundred pages deep only to fizzle out as it didn't go anywhere in particular. It's incredibly difficult to read, not so much because of the footnotes or the pure length as because of the structure of the story.
I'd previously enjoyed DFW's shorter work, and to some extent I think Infinite Jest is just a really large short story collection that links together in intricate ways to produce a bigger work. A lot of the chapters, or sub-chapter units of the book, really constitute stories or vignettes or essays of their own, and their significance to any broader plot (indeed the existence of any broader plot) only becomes significant later. DFW's brilliance in writing essays and short stories gives you these really gripping moments throughout that seem to have nothing to do with the entire rest of the story. DFW also uses very non-linear storytelling, with a confusing in world neologism for years, to obfuscate what you are seeing and when.
Then you have the overall setting, which is sort of semi-sci-fi magical realist near future-past in a way that's incredibly difficult to find your bearings in. When I read Tolstoy, I know what the rules of the universe are because they are the rules of my universe. When I read Asimov or Tolkien, I can quickly grok the rules of the universe because they're very different from the rules of our universe in specific fairly well explained ways. Infinite Jest's universe is different in confusing and non-specific ways, and it's not clear when narrators are unreliable or taking the piss, or when we're supposed to take things seriously. At times DFW chooses to be brutally realistic, at times absurdly fantastical, nearly always pessimistic in outlook.
It's also disgusting, viscerally disgusting in a way that only a writer as talented mechanically as DFW can be. Everyone is asymmetrical, everyone is disgusting, bodily acts are described in extensive detail, rape abuse illness and addiction are commonplace, deformity is everywhere. It's just how the book is, but there are significant sections that are just viscerally unpleasant.
Finally, I think the book has gotten a lot harder since its publication, in that it represented a fork from the past around the publication date. For my partner in my book club, who was a teenager when it was published and read it for the first time when she was in art school in the early 2000s, there are a lot of references or just moods that make more sense to her than they do to me, ten years her junior. It's very like Stranger in a Strange Land in that way, a retro-futuristic work that projects the current mores and world forward. In your mind you have to back up to 1995, then fast forward to a world where some technologies never develop and others hyper-develop.
That said, my foolproof method for reading difficult books is to just keep swimming. This developed when reading the great Russians, in that way that Americans typically get confused by the use of first name or surname or patronymic or title or affectionate diminutive to refer to the same character, I used to get stuck trying to figure out who exactly was who in Anna Karennina then I decided one day that I should just keep reading and I'd figure that out later, and that worked. I approach everything confusing in DFW the same way, I just keep reading and I figure it out later. I think this is what @Rov_Scam is getting at, knowing that it's an important book he keeps trying to read it while understanding everything said but it's impossible to understand everything so he can't read it; his brother just read it without worrying about understanding everything and was fine.
The other aid getting me through this reading is my book club, in which I meet up with a pretty lady every few hundred pages and we discuss the book and its themes and broader philosophical topics over drinks. And this creates accountability in that as a man I can't let a pretty woman mog me at something, and also makes the book easier in that discussion helps explain things. Marx's famously dense Kapital was originally published in France serially in socialist newspapers for workers to read in clubs, they wouldn't (probably couldn't) understand such a book on their own, but in a group it becomes comprehensible. The lack of reading groups is one of the unfortunate consequences of our world today.
It's truly a work of rarely-reached genius, a fitting heir to the western literary canon (though in my mind the canon truly ends with Joyce). It's highly prescient philosophically, it has a lot to say about modern concerns on AI. Though I also kind of think the whole book is just about internet porn. Everyone on this forum should put in the work to read it, it's worth it, but I can also see how its cultural impact is mostly negative rather than directly influential.
I do wonder if Parker and Stone were influenced by Infinite Jest when they wrote South Park, though.
I completely understand your experience regarding the Russians. In any given domestic situation, the same character is given four different names, and none of these are what his coworkers call him.
What really used to get me were the diminutives, which are not intuitive to an English speaker. Ilya doesn't naturally turn Ilushka in my mind.
Yes, Mr. Ivanov, Alexander Ivanovich, Alexander, Alex, Sasha, Sanya, Shura, Shurik, Ivanych, etc. are all the same person, depending on context. And using the wrong one in a wrong context may be a major social faux pas too. Unless you grew up with it, it can be a bit tricky to guess, especially that some diminutives have very little obvious connection to the full name, and some of them are also non-unique. You just have to know it.
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