I didn’t find Infinite Jest nearly as difficult.

However, his commencement speech 'This is water' is amazing, and I highly recommend it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

I'm currently plowing through David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest (which is enjoyable but taxing!) should be finished in 2020!

I think your comparison with Snow Crash has swung it for me; IJ is definitely on my reading list now

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest also deals with existentialism.

It's a 1000-page kind of experimental fiction about entertainment/addiction.

It took me a while to read, but is something I'd recommend, anyway.

Infinite Jest was acclaimed academically because it was a fresh return to un-ironic content and narrative.

I think IJ is more layers than recursive loops.

Compare Infinite Jest (a big book) with other smaller books on my site. Looks pretty cool!

The point is, don't feel sad and alone if you like Wallace's non-fiction and find yourself hating his novels.

Someone has read Infinite Jest

Very similar style to Infinite Jest, but the story seems much more sinister.

The Next 100 Years by George Friedman (amusing; was given to me as a gag gift)

Currently reading: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

My favorite book of all time and oddly prescient in many ways.

For instance, I'm aware of at least one startup developing the vid-chat masks Wallace wrote up with a straight face. See also snapchat filters.

While I'm at it, I also want embeddable fonts.

What I do not want is animation or interactivity, at least not in my novels.

Also going to read Infinite Jest while I'm traveling the next few weeks.

Edit: http://declineofscarcity.com/?page_id=2527

Published in 1996

- The Brothers Karamazov

- Infinite Jest

- Asterix the Gaul

I get a bunch recommendations for Spanish books (which I can't read).

Feel free to think that a novel is something one cranks out as if it's just an object that carries no meaning, requiring no sacrifice from the author. But that's an opinion, and not fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

I think E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction is essential reading. (PDF link: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf)

I'd tentatively recommend against starting with Infinite Jest. Infinite Jest is a project of a read.

Infinite Jest is also great, if you haven't read it. It gets a lot of bad press mostly due to being fetishized by a particular type of insufferable person. The book has its flaws, but is a great piece of writing and (depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc) may offer a different lens. Also, the writing is excellent.

My wife is also a huge fan, and we had a nice discussion over coffee this morning talking about the parts of the book you referenced in your bullet points. There’s really no one like DFW for diversity of style, and his sense of humor resonates so strongly with me that I often find myself laughing out loud while reading his books and essays.

Anyway, thanks for the great comment. Maybe it’s time to give Infinite Jest a reread!

DFW's Kenyan commencement speech is what got me interested in his writing. I'd like to go back and finish Infinite Jest at some point, but I don't see it happening any time soon.

Be Here Now - Ram Das

Whole Earth Catalog - Stewart Brand

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Savage Continent - Keith Lowe

Forged - Bart D. Ehrman

Young Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore

Court of the Red Czar - Simon Sebag Montefiore

It's certainly a long book but you don't have to treat it like a academic paper to enjoy reading it. It's a fun read, for real! Well actually it's kind of depressing but moment to moment it's fun.

>depending how old you are, where you are in life, etc may offer a different lens.

Could you elaborate more on this? I am curious. Maybe I could be right now in that situation. So in that case it would be optimal to start reading it now instead of in a year or two.

https://github.com/johnfn/GoodReadsScraper

Particularly, load bigdata.js into nodejs and then run a command sort of like this to parse out the results, filtering out young adult/romance/religion stuff/comics:

    bigdata.filter(f => f.ratings > 5000 && !f.genres.includes('Young Adult') && !f.genres.includes('Religion') && !f.genres.includes('Romance') && !f.genres.includes('Sequential Art')).map(f => f.title)

    'A Song of Ice and Fire',
    'Collected Fictions', (by Borges)
    'The Name of the Wind',
    'Infinite Jest',
    'The Complete Works',
    'The Way of Kings',
    'The Wise Man\'s Fear',
    'Ficciones',
    'A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold',
    'The Complete Stories',
    'Labyrinths',
    'Don\'t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!',
    'The Hiding Place',

This section is one of my favorites, about things he learned in a halfway home: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/966304-if-by-the-virtue-of-...

[1]: http://www.litinfinitejest.org/forums/

Funnily enough I think DFW would agree, in an interview somewhere (I think it was in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) he talks about the surreal experience of seeing all the hype and raves about his book immediately after release, when he knew no one had actually had time to read it.

I find some of the writing tough (i.e. impossible to read at night in bed) but the audio book for Infinite Jest narrated by Sean Pratt [1] is really nice. The narrator's speech is somehow easier to follow despite the number of clauses and whatever else in the writing.

[1] http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Infinite-Jest-Audiobook/B0...

The criqitue is mostly well-written and there's some issues I agree with, but they get pretty smarmy and smug by the end.

Non-Fiction / Science: Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

Non-Fiction / Business: Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross

Non-Fiction / Programming / Tech: OSGI in Action by Richard Hall, Karl Pauls, Stuart McCulloch, and David Savage

Definitely recommend Infinite Jest like probably anyone else in this thread, but would recommend reading his non-fiction first. Jumping into Infinite Jest, I thought Wallace was some wierdo crank for a long time before I "got" his style and what he was going for. Even then, it took a long time before I enjoyed it and he very quickly became one of my favorite authors.

I think Infinite Jest and GEB are two of the only epic books that accomplishes so much, but in two entirely different contexts. They both build intense, well founded and well structured frameworks that lead up to epic resolutions, despite being respectively fiction and non-fiction.

I still think about finishing it one day. The thought of it won’t leave me alone and it’s been years now. To many other books to read though, and time is scarce!

House of Leaves has a very uninteresting plot, and raises more questions than it answers. It's physically painful to read, because most pages, you have to rotate the entire book every which way since the words go in spirals.

Infinite Jest is good, but way too long. A good 70% of the book could have been cut out or condensed. The writing is also intentionally bad, which makes it harder to read. There are definitely good lines, but it's kind of like DFW used a random sentence generator and some of the lines just happened to be amazing, but 90% of it is garbage.

Is it really such a terrible thing that people who hadn’t heard about DFW while he was alive are seeing and enjoying his This Is Water speech? I think it does a good job of describing how easy it is to fall into a pattern of letting the world around you control how you feel on a minute-to-minute basis. Yeah he ties the whole idea up too neatly, but it’s a commencement speech not a long form essay.

Sure, there are probably plenty of people out there putting DFW up on a “tortured artist too brilliant for this world” pedestal. But I think the author isn’t giving people enough credit to assume that is the only reason for his recent popular appeal. Maybe people stumbled upon the This Is Water video, watched it, and it inspired them to think a bit differently about their own thought process and feelings.

You don’t need to have consumed everything an artist has produced to be inspired by one of them.

This isn't to say I don't see the value in brevity or that I don't believe it's difficult to write good short books: I do think it's difficult. However because reading a 1000-page book does take more time (I don't think it's necessarily harder word for word) you have to make the writing worth it, which is undeniably difficult.

DFW wrote a lot of Infinite Jest three blocks south of me and across the street from the coop where I buy groceries. It is still kind of eerie walking by the house with a bag of groceries.

To spin this around a little: we don't talk about authors in the past whose prose isn't worth going back to. Shakespeare had many contemporaries, but you might be hard pressed to name more than a couple.

Good prose can be challenging, and people don't want to be challenged all the time. I admire Pynchon's writing in Gravity's Rainbow - I don't want every book I read to be like that.

Or to put it another way: there are many novels from the 19th century that were massively popular at the time, but totally forgotten about now. They were novels that were pretty average in terms of prose, but had stories that were relevant to people at the time, and gripped them.

I doubt if in a hundred years people will still be reading the Da Vinci Code - but I can guarantee books like Infinite Jest, The Satanic Verses, Nights at the Circus, and the like will be attracting critical attention.

Gravity Rainbow has Pynchon's inimitable prose, constant segue between language register and mingling between the trivial and the profound. Infinite Jest is rambling and convoluted but it is extremely funny from the get go. Both can be a joy to read even if you don't finish them.

Ulysses on the other hand asks more from its readers. You can pretty much ignore the references in Gravity's Rainbow and still get (or not get) the point. Meanwhile, Ulysses is full of oblique metaphors and layered references which make it impossible to understand without knowledge of the referenced material.

I'm halfway through Infinite Jest right now (putting me many weeks behind http://infinitesummer.org, and I recommend it as well.

Personally I find it him to be turgid and overwrought but I get why people enjoy him and come back. His essays are entertaining but I've never gleaned any great insight or inspiration from him.

The easy way to think decisions is with the rational actor model. "The United States didn't sign the TPP agreement because..." "Apple removed the headphone jack because..." When the reality of large organizations is that decisions are made in the interaction of many people suborganizations. Allison and Zelikow are political scientists who massively advanced academic understanding of organization decision making... to illustrate their theories, they did original research into the Cuban missile crisis using it as an example of various models. Very accessible. It changed the way I think about how companies, governments, and the world works.

"Infinite Jest" - David Foster Wallace

It changed my life. This book taught me empathy and the truth in ordinary things... It's brilliant and amazing and worth making your way through 1000+ pages. RIP DFW.

Gravity’s Rainbow in particular is confusing for a long while but when it begins to come together it’s rewarding.

Agreed - Finnegan's Wake is impossible. Try the audio version and it’s somehow even more difficult. I was tempted to eat a bag of mushrooms and listen to it but alas, perhaps one day far in the future.

A pdf reader that let's you search quotes on reddit to see what comments are about that quote.

Meditation app that (gruesome alert) makes you meditate on impermanence by seeing a corpse of yours (oldify + zombify).

Netflix for classics books with movies (Albert Camus The Stranger etc)

Etc...

After reading your comment I decided to have another look at it. I knew last time that it was a weird book, and that it was enjoyed by a lot of people. But even looking at the first page of it again I just don’t feel compelled to read it. Maybe some day.

It's now pretty clear entertainment can be neurologically addictive, as evidenced by the social media companies and their abilities to predict improved engagement.

On top of that, we've now got an attention + an opioid addiction.

If anything, DFW was just very early at predicting the medium term state, complete with national secession movements.

Not bad for a 'verbose' fiction writer.

I don't disagree with you w/r/t wealth being a possible contributor to the motivations for suicide, but I believe that there are as many reasons a person could kill themselves as we can imagine, only some of which might involve their richness and famousness. Suicide is a dark, multi-tentacled thing.

One thing I learned was it has detailed knowledge of the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender, seemingly through fanfics. It was fun having it to teach me the lost arts of pizzabending ("form your hands into the shape of a letter 'P'" and so on, and needing to practice by juggling rubber pizzas) and beetlebending ("always remember that to beetle bend it helps to like beetles," my wise uncle suggested). Each of these tended to precipitate a narrative collapse.

The writing style was surprisingly homogeneous, and it reminded me of young adult novels. It would definitely be interesting to see it with other writing styles, beyond the occasional old poetry.

I love the idea that many things in life can be modeled as addictions. Abstractly, an addiction takes the pattern of long periods of misery (plateau) interrupted by brief moments of ecstasy - what's special about an addiction is that it feels like the moments of ecstasy are worth it. This pattern is similar to that involved in learning a new skill, or going through a personality change.

If it helps anyone decide whether to give it a go, two recent books I read and loved were 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, and Underworld by Don DeLillo, and Infinite Jest is satisfying me in the hard-earned way they both did.

"Infinite Jest was infinitely boring, a lot of the "edginess" feels dated and the problems the characters deal with feel juvenile. Its also devoid of emotions that feels like the isolation of the American suburbs.
I liked many hard to read books, Joyce for example, as well as postmodernism, but I can't recommend this collection of superficial rants and emotional sterility.
Curiously, the people that liked this book had the same kind of emotional sterility I despise. Mostly, whiny, stuck up English majors from the suburbs. Often with few life experiences."

I'd recommend David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; Junot Diaz's This is How You Lose Her; The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis; Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

I wish when I went into college I understood women better, people with mental health issues, sexuality, drugs, rich people, powerful people, old people.

He'll have 2x4 year periods where he'll be able to build long-lasting relationships. Understanding himself and other people will pay off much better than solving puzzles. So I'd stick to really aggressive contemporary fiction. He'll find math on his own.

other than that, don't be too afraid -- Infinite Jest is intentionally complicated and convoluted, being a bit confused is part of the experience. even if you aren't quite sure what's going on in every chapter, the writing is gorgeous and funny even on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

You'll meet one character, then move on to another character, then return to the first character four hundred pages later. You'll read footnotes on footnotes that refer to other footnotes. There will be plays on words that appear on page 20 and then are reprised on page 600. Extended metaphors are introduced and return without warning.

Just start reading it, and if it gets too hard, put it down a bit. It's still a book for entertainment (the whole story is _about_ entertainment), so don't treat it too much like it's homework. just have fun with it :)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera showed me another perspective of love I had never considered. Gave me insight into vulnerability.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes showed me how by looking through the world via a lens of intellect, you can often miss the point.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God by Etgar Keret a collection of some of my favourite short stories. Highly recommend.

Also getting longer books is a really good value, since they cost the same. Just get Infinite Jest instead of 5 separate books.

I liked many hard to read books, Joyce for example, as well as postmodernism, but I can't recommend this collection of superficial rants and emotional sterility.

Curiously, the people that liked this book had the same kind of emotional sterility I despise. Mostly, whiny, stuck up English majors from the suburbs. Often with few life experiences.

I honestly have no idea how people read that book in public. I read it during the winter in my bedroom, which was perfect because there was nothing to pull my attention away and interrupt the experience.

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”

Use the story title! It's in the guidelines!

Articles like this, it seems to turn out, are part of Dale Peck's schtick, as you'll quickly learn from a Wikipedia page that seems to think these kinds of takedowns are the most notable thing about him:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Peck

I'm always there for a good takedown, and while I like DFW's writing I think Infinite Jest is a rich, slow-moving, and inexplicably unharried target. But I do think it's kind of funny that Peck opens by saying that Infinite Jest is a book without much of a plot, in which not much happens other than a 700 page conversation, and then spends 2 gigantic paragraphs trying to explain all the details of the plot. Which, it turns out later, he actually enjoys, once the puzzle pieces fall into place and reveal the book's underlying simplicity. OK then.

The bit in Infinite Jest written in (attempted) African American vernacular is truly awful, though. Peck is clearly right about that.

I don't remember the wording of the preface, but I recall it arguing that the sheer size of the book could be regarded both as a cultural experience as well as a mental exercise.

The author of the preface argued that when (or perhaps if) you finished the book you would feel like you've just run a marathon. You would be highly fit, reading wise. Nothing would phase you.

This was probably compounded in my teenage head by the fact that the only quote I've heard from the author beforehand was:

"I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, 'The library, and step on it.'"

It sounded like a complete opposite of myself at the time, but I did want to learn that ability. And
I liked that preface a lot. It kept me going at it month after month on busy train rides, with the promise of some transcendent reward at the end.

There are famous footnotes in that book spanning several pages in tiny print. The amount of mental effort it took to read the thing was extraordinary for someone like me at the time. I often had to backtrack several pages to perform the context switch from a mini-novel footnote back to the main storyline.

This was many years ago now, and I have slipped far behind on my reading fitness. But I still carry with me the realization that I can't expect to be fit if I don't train hard.

Now, ADD is a whole nother beast. Sicknesses often require medical attention and this should not be smoothed over. Still, I think there's an interesting discussion to be had regarding reading fitness in the era of information. Maybe this is a widely discussed thing and I'm just not hearing it, but it seems obvious that we slip further toward obesity without training. Surely something similar happens with our ability to focus without training?

Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clark

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

The Informant - Kurt Eichenwald

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte

Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis

And yes, Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is definitely a must-read if you're interested in urban areas.

The second time I picked up the book, I made it all the way through and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I see this in the same vein as Paul Beatty's _The Sellout_. There's a lot of stream of consciousness, there's a plethora of characters, and you have to really be paying attention to figure out exactly what's going on. These books aren't for everyone, but they're certainly important parts of American Literature.

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

Conversely, when people criticize groups that focus on a shared intellectual pleasure, that criticism too is often just more signalling, especially if there is something to be gained by undercutting the value of the intellectual pursuit in question.

Some people are prolific readers and they read things like Infinite Jest and get pleasure from discussing its obscurities.

Then some other people don’t want intellectual merit to be associated with the workload of reading a heavy book they may not particularly like, so they invent some story about how Infinite Jest readers are arrogant.

You could say the same thing about so many things: prolific open source software contribution, prolific consumption of obscure music or music that was lost to history, prolific love of a cult TV show, prolific focus on niche cooking techniques or recipes.

I think any comments that try to apply the negative stereotype to the whole group are just unproductive.

But it will always be this signalling arms race between showing value through obscure intellectual pursuit vs. undercutting that so as to avoid needing to expend the effort while still getting credit for being intellectual.

After reading Infinite Jest, I have struggled to find any author to equal its vitality, and have been frequently disappointed by the flat hollow fakeness of most works I have read since it, by authors both new to me (Paul Auster) and old (William Gibson).

His use of language has a kind of magical... it is hard to get exactly how he does it but his writing brings his characters alive.

I am crushed and saddened by his death and the tragedy of its cause. Depression haunts the people in many of our lives. It is a terrible disease made worse by the mistaken notion that melancholy is somehow noble or simply a fact of creativity, an illness to be proud of. It is certainly not.

> The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.

- http://fictionadvocate.com/2012/09/19/the-infinite-jest-live...

I feel like the novel is winding down, actually. There's no great proliferation of ideas any more. The last great author I can think of was Beckett; after him, everybody I've read really seems to be struggling to do something new. Even Murakami (who, not counting Wallace, I think is the greatest of the generation) is less innovative than the authors who preceded him.

Is it possible that a novel as a pure-prose medium can be exhausted in terms of ideas? Because I think (and I've written rather extensively about this) that for the novel to go on, it'll have to evolve to match current technology, in the way that Coupland and Danielewski do it. But that means a departure from pure literature, in a way.

I think the relevant parts are toward the beginning. Full thing's worth listening to, several times. Or you could just read Infinite Jest.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FkxUY0kxH80

Particularly around 18 and 24 minutes, continuing for 6-10 minutes after. Ah yes, particularly at 30m.

The theme is interwoven throughought the interview though.

But you have no idea what's going on in the book for the first 300 pages or so. It takes until around 500 pages in before you're immersed in the story, and then reading it becomes kind of an addiction. And once you're done, you feel an intense need to start it over again, knowing what you do now.

I only really got the theme of it on the second reading. I actually put it down for a few months the first time I tried to read it because I was confused. But it's worth it...oh man, is it worth it.

The only things that I can compare it to are more literary, but "Breakfast of Champions", "Foucalts Pendulum" or "Infinite Jest", aren't out of order.

They are all products of brilliant, obsessive, minds making a concerted effort to explain what they can see above the clouds.

As much intellectual ego that gets bandied about between computer programmers, its nice to keep a humbling base where you can actually see that no matter how smart you think you are, that there are people who are way way way smarter than you and actually have the dedication, skill and expertise to try to help you understand what they have spent their life learning.

Orin, the main character's older brother, becomes a semi-recluse/sociopath, which is the closest character to an explicit Hikikomori DFW paints in the book. The other major characters rely on other forms of relief to cope with their anxiety, depression, family issues, etc.

DFW wrote Infinite Jest in 1996 before the internet truly took over. I'd love to see another book tackle the issues and repercussions of internet-soaked culture the way DFW tackled the nature of addiction in Infinite Jest.

The Wire felt like it actually taught me something and made me think about society and my role in it. But to what extent are Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Westworld basically same as daytime soap operas dressed up so they're palatable to 'discerning' consumers?

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but I do find that many people, myself included, justify their TV habits by arguing that we're watching 'quality' TV instead of the usual daytime garbage.

(I've been reading Infinite Jest and recently read Wallace' "E Unibus Pluram"[1], so this has been on my mind.)

[1]: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

I think if you watch an interview with DFW you will realize just how much he has thought of just about every facet of modern, entertainment-centric western society - all coming together in Infinite Jest which is the most depressing book I've ever read (he later committed suicide, so it might have been the most depressing contemporary book ever written either). Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness models an entire planetary civilization with no fixed sex (written in 1969, mind you), which I found very eye-opening. Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (as well as Crime and Punishment) are extraordinarily psychological and philosophical - ethics, free will, and God are centric. Both Steinbeck and Vonnegut have multiple books I'd recommend, but East of Eden by Steinbeck is an all-time favorite tackling good and evil (honestly Nietzsche in novel); Slaughterhouse 5 by Vonnegut (just a notch above Heller's Catch-22) is the embodiment of darkness and absurdity. Take an anti-war sentiment and an author willing to tiptoe to the border of sanity and insanity and the result is SH5. It is truly brilliant, and as someone who is fortunate enough to not have ever been impacted greatly by wartime, it is equally eye-opening.

Honorable mention (a book I have read more recently) goes to Tom Wolfe with The Bonfire of the Vanities. This book combines the legal system (police and prosecutors), personal greed and ambition (Wall Street bond salesman), racism (Media biases), and class structures and privilege in a hard hitting social critique on 80s New York City. Everything between its covers is key to understanding how the world actually works.

This turned out to be a lot longer than I anticipated. Hopefully it is helpful!

While cramming stuff into multiple-page-long footnotes and footnotes with footnotes felt a bit gimmicky at first, a few experiences stand out:

1. getting so drawn into a long footnote that I forgot it was a footnote. The confusion upon getting back to the main story felt right for that point in the story (or the book in general)
2. a large number of footnotes that were mildly interesting at first and turned out to be hugely valuable later on (but not crucial to enjoying the book).
3. footnotes that were funny precisely because they were footnotes and somewhat self-aware of it.

If you like Wallace' essays or the themes he kept going back to (depression, self-analysis, addiction, irony, media), I can highly recommend going through the effort of reading the book. It took me multiple tries over a period of maybe a decade to finally finish. Once I got past 200 pages it became difficult to put the (massive) book down and now, weeks later, I'm still thinking about it regularly. Few books have had that effect on me.

It's weird to see someone you think of as writing in a genre that kind of combines Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov with an almost fanatic pleading for empathy and communion -- described as someone who writes puzzles and brain teasers!

He wrote great stuff about addiction, entertainment, alienation, human communication, depression; stuff that to at least one withdrawn academic prone to sadness and anxiety was enormously powerful and redemptive and transformative.

He was a cerebral guy, he studied formal logic and math; that doesn't make him nonhuman! Is language not a valid, "people" thing to write about? People do have "trouble communicating," people are affected by the culture of television, even "postmodernism" and "irony" and "solipsism" are relevant in a deep, basic human sense for lots of (confused, lost) people.

(Granted, his nonfiction pieces are what I like best -- every essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing is gold -- still, Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Infinite Jest are powerful books, though sometimes tragic on many levels.)

On this topic I certainly agreed with him. I found that section horribly out of tune and out of touch. Also---though maybe I'm forgetting something---I recall it played almost no role in the story or plot. It stuck out as easily the hardest part to get through during my second read.

1. Any book that you expect to read once and once only (popular science, pulp fiction, toilet-reading) rent from the library. Keep it by your bed at night and give-er by the lamplight.

2. Any book that you can read, word-over-word, end-on-end, without confusion or introspection can be consumed in condensed form. Condensed forms come in many guises:(audio-books, blog-feeds, wiki-pages etc.)

3. You are missing out on all the glories that are not defined by 1 and 2. A good book should be a conversation, held at length, over time.

You asked for philosphy in another comment:

Victor Frankyl: Man in search of meaning

Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

Jung: Development of Personality, Archetypes/Aion

Nietsche: all and any

For philosophical fiction:

Goethe: Faust

Hemingway: Death in the afternoon (this was my first glimpse into why books can provide lightness of body, displacement of time: wait for the 4th-wall-breaking-rapport with the old woman)

David Foster Wallace:Rise Simba, Infinite Jest, etc.

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-...

There have been studies that your brain scans feeds and webpages differently than text on a page. You set yourself up to not pay attention / are just "scraping the good bits"

Someone mentioned a while back that Infinite Jest (1000 page tome + 300 pages endnotes!) had ~50 pages that made the whole thing worth it. The immediate following comment was "why not just read the 50 pages?". It is the context around which we find our content that gives it worth. The internet allows you to bypass the context.

The first time I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace I found myself unable to determine what was Important for much of the first few hundred pages. None of it made sense and I couldn't figure out what The Point of the book was. I kind of read the pages but didn't really take any of it in.

The second time I read it was a completely different experience: those first pages immediately made sense, and I derived a sense of pleasure in reading them that I didn't have the first time around.

There's a quote in the novel Infinite Jest that changed my perception on suicide. This passage helped me make some sense of something so terrible. It helped me see that I honestly can't even imagine what's going through the head of someone who is going against every human instinct to otherwise survive.

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

For shorter books I agree that paper is superior, I don't have to worry about damage, battery level or theft, I can easily borrow and lend them (I think you can do that with Kindle nowadays but it can't be as convenient as lending a physical object).

Other favorites: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, In Our Time by Hemingway, The Magus by John Fowles, 100 years of solitude, Moby Dick (perhaps a precursor to all modern fantasy?) Stranger in a Strange Land, and Infinite Jest. I've also loved both of DFW's big essay collections: Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll never Do Again.

Don't skip the footnotes when reading IJ. There's some important stuff in there.

Don't get frustrated when you get to the end of the book and aren't sure what just happened. That's why ladyada correctly says that you'll need to read it again when you get done.

I've also read Nick Carr's "The Shallows"[2] and other authors about about the web's effect on attention span, distractions, etc.

With all that said, I'm not convinced that people "should" read long form books. I read all those books because I personally enjoyed it. I just can't say with confidence that others should do the same or they will be "missing out" on some unquantifiable intellectual nirvana.

I also enjoy getting lost in Wikipedia articles and jumping around hyperlinks without fully finishing the wiki article I was reading. (Wiki articles are not ever "finished" anyway so there's no guilt trip in leaving the page to head down another rabbit hole.)

15 years ago, I read a dozen of C++ books cover-to-cover. Can someone today get similar levels of knowledge jumping around quality blog posts and watching youtube videos? I think so. I don't hold my traditional reading method for C++ to be superior; it's simply what I did before the internet was available in 1995. I certainly did not learn Golang by reading a book cover-to-cover.

Books certainly have benefits but I think they are overstated in relation to non-book forms of consuming words.

[1]http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html

[2]http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp...

It doesn’t say much about those future engineers at all.

It’s easy to write inscrutable code that even veteran engineers can’t understand, yet still “gets the job done.”

Also, you act like this would imply that all future engineers are the same, but that is not true and not related to my points.

You’re writing code for the inexperienced future engineer, some poor soul tossed into a legacy codebase without much help. It’s not their fault they were put in that position. It’s sink or swim. Good code helps _that_ person swim.

As for the quote you mention,

> “One of my favourite sayings is "the code is unreadable to you, because you are not qualified to understand it yet".

That is a horrible way of thinking, with built in condescending attitudes and everything. If code is unreadable to someone, beyond basic syntax definitions, that is the author’s fault and not at all the reader’s fault for being inexperienced.

The reason 5th graders can’t read Infinite Jest is because David Foster Wallace tried to make it complicated, not because, in some skewed perspective, the writing is perfectly simple but 5th graders just aren’t experienced enough yet. It’s a complexity property of the writing not of the reader’s brain.

With literature you can get away with this because there are extenuating arguments about artistic merit.

For business software, not so. In that case, if you write something more like DFW and less like Hemingway, it’s a sign of laziness and lack of self-discipline.. and not at all a sign of skill advancement.

The issue is that I'm a "distracted reader" and tend to leave books half-finished. Unfortunately, the likelihood of this happening is a function of the book's length and density: if I can read it in a day or two, there's no time to get distracted, but Infinite Jest is both long and slow. Someday, though.

When I read, at most, I'll say the first two words of a sentence every two to three sentences in my mind, before reading turns into more of an absorption of whats on the page. Obvious exceptions being when I'm reading something like Infinite Jest or Finnigans Wake (which sits unfinished on a table at home). But those books are difficult.

I completely agree on the discussion here and that Piketty has struck a nerve. I was just a bit annoyed that no one was even attempting to claim actual knowledge of the book at hand, but was ready to make statements on its content, without any kind of qualifier (really, all I wanted). I have a feeling this is going to be one of those books whose influence, at least in discussion, will be greater than expected given the people in those conversations who didn't read it. I have found it an easier read than I expected though. Right now I alternate between it or Infinite Jest each night, which is a really nice change of pace in either direction.

I got the ebook on my tablet to just speed through in bed, but I've realized this is going to be one I'll need a physical copy of eventually to annotate. Thanks for the link to your subreddit, I've subscribed.

i.e./tl;dr, Infinite Jest is itself the infinite entertainment it describes.

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract
conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in
whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling
from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out
the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get
close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames.
And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd
have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Newer Stuff: Nine Stories (Salinger), The Razor's Edge (Maugham), Nausea (Sartre), Siddartha (Hesse), Road to Serfdom (Hayek), The Book (Watts), Design of Everyday Things (Norman), Atlas Shrugged (Rand), Invisible Man (Ellison), Debunking Economics (Keen), Blood Meridian (McCarthy), The Center Cannot Hold (Saks), This Time Is Different (Reinhart/Rogoff), Infinite Jest (Wallace), Calvin and Hobbes (Watterson)

All of these books are well written and have given me some perspective on interesting people/situations/ways of thinking.

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

And here's a longer excerpt from the book that includes the quote, with some discussion: http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2011/04/elements-of-suic...

I had to take a 3 month break in the middle of Infinite Jest (not recommended) and even then, finishing it was the most rewarding and somehow obscenely frustrating literary experiences I've ever had.

This accomplishment/frustration thing is also central to the book and is "the point" (really one of several). The fact that it still has that effect even when I know it was meant to is a testament to how well it worked.

For your consideration:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor for tax revenue. The years of Subsidized Time are:
Year of the Whopper
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.)
Year of Glad

Nice write up by Jason Kottke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace

David Foster Wallace (excerpt from blog post)
Edgar Allen Poe (introduction to peer-reviewed journal article)
Jonathan Swift (concluding paragraph from ibid)

I also tried:

The first few paragraph's of Wallace's Infinite Jest (he writes like himself)

The first few paragraphs of The Raven (Poe writes like HP Lovecraft), then the whole of The Raven (now Shakespeare), and first three paragraphs of The Masque of the Red Death (now Anne Rice)

The first three paragraphs of Swift's A Modest Proposal (Daniel Defoe).

I don't know much about literature--maybe e.g. Defoe's writing is similar to Swift's--but without seeing the reasons why I write like a particular author, I take these results with a grain of salt.

Anhilliation - Fish out of water like story of exploring a mysterious, horrific, environment (2 sequels drag on for too much after this one though)

Many Ray Bradbury stories (Martian chronicles, and the Everyman collection contain the best ones)

Infinite Jest (Alternate American future of a culture of addiction and depravity, partly mediated by technology)

The Circle (haven't read, but like the author, life inside the biggest tech company of the future)

Cloud Atlas employs the same structure deliberately, with wonderful narrative impact. You have to climb up the mountain in order to climb back down.

I do think GEB is the same way. The first half of the book is the climb. The second half is merely the question, what can we see from way up here?

2. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

3. The Fellowship of the Ring (J. R. R. Tolkien)

4. The Sin of Certainty (Peter Enns)

5. The Bible Tells Me So (Peter Enns)

6. Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations

7. Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman)

8. Elantris (Brandon Sanderson)

9. A Wild Sheep Chase (Haruki Murakami)

10. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami)

11. Freedom TM (Daniel Suarez)

12. Lightning (Dean Koontz)

13. Daemons (Daniel Suarez)

14. Foundation and Earth (Isaac Asimov)

15. Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury)

16. Fear and Loathing in Las Veges (Hunter S. Thompson)

17. Foundation's Edge (Isaac Asimov)

18. The Doors of Perception (Aldous Huxley)

19. Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

20. Tortilla Flat (John Steinbeck)

21. The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)