Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Yes, I read this. No, I’m not kidding! I read the whole thing. In fact, I read it 1.5 times. The epic Gen X book about tennis, addiction and entertainment is 1,000+ pages punctuated with another 100+ pages of detailed endnotes. I first tried to read it when I was just out of college, a cool 20-something who wanted to look even cooler. So I bought this big ol’ book and started reading. After about 600 pages, I drifted away from the book – not because I didn’t like it, but because I was a cool guy with cool things to do (i.e. playing Halo 3). And this is not a book that you can just dip into every few weeks, read a few pages, and go about your cool-guy life. 

Years later, when I was a thoughtful, handsome 30-something who knew everything about life, I went back to the book and dedicated time to reading it. Because I’m a slow reader, and this book is an unabridged dictionary dressed up as a novel, it probably took 6 months to finish it…at least! This book is a behemoth of words – big words – long sentences – confusing, convoluted plots – a billion characters…it’s a lot. It’s the entire Cheesecake Factory menu of post-modern literature.

What did I think of it? At the time, I loved it. The minute I finished the book, I went online to tell the world that this is the peak of human art. I ranked it as my favorite book of all books! 

But now, as a distinguished, world-weary, even more handsome 40-something living in a post-Twitter world, my love for the book has dipped. It’s a book that connects with young people (young men, specifically, because those are the people who CANNOT shut up about this book). I admire the writing, the literary gymnastics, the absurd sense of humor, but there is the overall gimmick of the novel (the length, the density, the end notes, etc.) that makes it a little show-offy. Did I mention it’s long? 

David Foster Wallace was a genius. No question. And this is a great book. No question. But it’s not my favorite book of all books. 

Tastes change. People change. Things you liked years ago are now things you like less. Life’s like that. And to explain why life is like that, perhaps I should write a 600,000 word novel about a teenager who works in a toothpick factory whose mundane day-to-day life somehow explains and mimics the Vietnam War as told through the perspective of an unreliable narrator who, if you read the 500 pages of end notes and know Morse code, you’ll realize is the ghost of Ronald Reagan. Proposed title: Pick It. Trust me, it’ll make sense after a white guy explains it to you in a 4-hour YouTube essay. 

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