Friday, July 03, 2009

Infinite Test







I read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest from March to June this year. I intentionally read it very slowly, trying to savor what is a very thick, and even more dense book. If you tried to read it too quickly, your head would likely start to wobble in a distinctly oval path.

So it is with a profound sense of now-you-tell-me that I discovered, through a post at Matt Yglesias's Blog that he and a group of friends are reading IJ this summer, and blogging about it at A Supposedly Fun Blog. It's a real joy to hear opinions from people as they plow their way through the best book I ever read.

Honestly. Set aside a few months. Read slowly, only a few hours a day, preferably morning so you can mull over what you just injested, and enjoy the high, so to speak. It's addictive, and if you take it in small doses over a long time, it won't kill you to finish it (Mithridates, he died old), and the withdrawals when you're done won't be quite as bad as if you'd filled up your day with it every day. But and so.

Oh, and you might want to brush up on your Hamlet first...

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