Tales of Slow Brave Athena: Infinite Summer

July 5, 2009

Infinite Summer

I'm participating in Infinite Summer.

Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.

I'm a big DFW non-fiction fan and have been for a long time, but I hadn't read his fiction.

It's not just because that Infinite Jest is huge, being the DFW novel, and at 1079 pages a big commitment (though he has several written several, less prominent pieces of fiction).

I tend to not read a whole lot of fiction in general, and I want fiction to have the same sorts of affect that I get from nonfiction: I want to learn something from it.

It goes without saying that I am behind, but not as badly as I might have thought. I need to be at p. 168 tomorrow -- I'm currently at p. 124. (This means I'm at 12.6%, which is definitely behind) This long weekend has been good to hole up and read, and also to look at the various other David Foster Wallace reading aids and videos, and IS blogs, etc., and try to make connections.

Last night, I watched Another Random Bit: the perspective of David Foster Wallace, which features parts from his Harpers pieces, A Trip to the Fair, and A supposeably fun thing, which were republished in A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again : essays and arguments. I've loved both the essays, and read them repeatedly, and yet there is something so poetic in hearing his read them before an audience.

But reading Infinite Jest is hard. It's huge, it's vast, and especially at the beginning, it has too many characters, too many stories. It's so complex-- Infinite Jest is one of those things, I fear, that required repeated readings.

Given that I haven't read a physical book in awhile, this has been both daunting, and enjoyable. I've started charting things out, since they aren't presented in a linear sense; the subsidized years, the characters, the connections.

And I did feel like I was wandering in the wilderness until I came to footnote 24, a 9 page filmography of James Incandenza. And then, I started seeing the connections, and feeling like this might make a very interesting map.

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I'm reading a library copy but I'm not guessing that I'll be able to keep it so I can finish it, so I have a copy on order with my favorite local bookstore... which I hope will get it soon, because I'm beginning to panic... just a little.

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There is also just way too much here that reveals (in retrospect) the pain that DFW knew. The chapter on Kate Gompert, a suicide in a mental ward, is really painful. I've been there (the emotional part, not the physically locked up part), and knowing that DFW was too... I mean, of course he was there. Which doesn't lessen the sting of his being gone.

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In another universe, I'm loving Lynda Barry's later works. What It Is is a revelation, the power of reading, of drawing, and the stories that we tell ourselves in doing these things. She writes the Editor's foreword for Best American Comics, 2008 exploring these topics as well.

A couple resources for other Infinite Summerarians:

Posted at July 5, 2009

Comments

Hey, cool! I'm reading IJ, too!

You wrote this a while ago, so I bet you're past page 200 by now. Have you noticed it calmed down a bit after that point, become more palatable and linear? Perhaps I'm just developing more of a taste for the rhythm of the book after forcing myself through the first 200 pages, but it's more effortless reading now. I think, too, having a better understanding of the core characters and their relationships with each other is making it more pleasurable.

At any rate, I'm glad you're doing Infinite Summer. Or, as Jeff mused when I was complaining about the first 200 pages, "more like Infinite Bummer..."

Posted by: Hollie at July 17, 2009 10:48 AM