Bought a $35 used copy of Infinite Jest and it sat on my nightstand for 8 months before I cracked it open

That book is so dense I spent the first 3 hours just flipping back to the footnotes, and now I am wondering if I should have just watched the movie instead.

3 comments

3 Comments

brian_hart15d ago

The way we treat books like Infinite Jest is the same way we handle anything that promises too much. People buy a gym membership in January and never go, sign up for a language app and forget about it after a week, or buy a fancy blender to make smoothies and let it collect dust. We want the credit for wanting to do the hard thing without actually doing it. That book on the nightstand is just a trophy for your future self, and the real fight is getting past the footnotes and into the actual story.

craig.olivia15d ago

Ah but Infinite Jest has like 100 pages of endnotes, not footnotes. Maybe it's just me but that detail always bugs me when people talk about it, because flipping back and forth is a totally different experience than glancing at the bottom of the page. I actually think the endnotes are what make it feel more like a trap than a trophy, you can't even fake your way through it without breaking the spine in three places. I tried reading it on a Kindle once and the endnote navigation made me want to throw my tablet across the room.

wade_dixon15d ago

People buy a gym membership in January and never go" is way too real, man. That book on the nightstand is basically my shelf of shame, but I finally finished it last summer after I got stuck at my parents' house with no internet for a weekend. Sometimes the only way to get through something like that is to trap yourself so you have no other options.