150 pages (and about 15 pages of footnotes) into Infinite Jest. Heavens, it's good. It's nearly indescribably complex, but I will take a shot at it in the next few days. I recall fighting through the filmography of James Incandenza as an excruciating chore, but it hits me as much funnier this time.
I've had this clunky hardcover of "Infinite Jest" sitting on a table for some time. I'm thinking of cracking it on my birthday and rea, like, four pages a day. I figure by my next birthday I should complete it. Would you recomend reading it this way or is it better to do the Bataan death march through it?
I believe Infinite Jest to be a totally rewarding task. If you're intimidated by the # of pages (and if you're not, you're inhuman), maybe try cracking it in the middle and working your way through that way. It doesn't have a clear beginning/end, so you can easily get by reading it from the middle and working your way back to the starting point.
And also, don't read the footnotes that look overlong. Most of the footnotes are rewarding, but not essential. Think of them as the "for fans only" section of the book.
You know, Adamfromhiinthemiddle, I disagree on this point. I am trying to read the book this time with the crazed focus of a grad student. I am about 1/6 th the way through, and there have been multiple cases of info that you can only pull from the footnotes greatly illuminating what's going on in the body of the book. I will point out the most recent one. In the first short section following the long rambling discourse 10-year-old Jim Incandenza is getting from his father, Pemulis is musing on a transaction he recently completed. (For people that don't know the book, there aren't chapters per se, but segments most frequently listing the year in which the segment took place; and the years are no longer numbered, so it's hard to say "turn to chapter 6 about mid-way through"; this particular segment is entitled "4 November Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment", year numbers having been sold to corporate sponsorship. And it's not the book's only "4 November Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment", making it even more difficult to find. But surely people who have read the book can't forget Jim's Dad's excruciatingly detailed description of the what he sees as the defining moment of his entire life.)
Anyway, you get this sentence: "DMZ is also sometimes referred to in some metro Boston chemical circles as Madame Psychosis, after a popular very-early-morning cult radio personality on MIT's student-run radio station WYYY-109..."
The thing is, unless you carefully read Jim Incandenza's Filmography, a footnote that runs 9 full pages, this sentence feels like a toss-off, when in fact it ties together one of the many unanswered mysteries at this point in the narrative; what exactly is happening to Prince Q______________'s medical attache?
Like I say, this sort of thing has occurred 4 or 5 times already; I really think the footnotes hold many of the keys to resolving some of the open questions of the narrative, although people should also be aware that there's about a dozen great ideas tossed out on each page, and most of those open questions will remain unresolved at the book's end.
I get a similar feeling when I read this book that I got when I read Clockers; not that they are structurally or stylistically similar, but whereas most people want a giant plot that resolves, you're reading these books to be educated about something you don't know. And every page of Infinite Jest as about 3 and a half educations. One of my buddies in the English Department said either the 4th or 5th time he read it, he tried to read it as poetry, just revelling in the flow of the prose, the wordplay and complexity. But there's plenty to enjoy even if you just want stories.
Sorry for the length of this.