Long term reading update: I've gotten bogged down with Infinite Jest. Even reading just 3-5 pages a day has become a chore. I started reading this massive tome almost exactly a year ago.
Some context: A couple of years ago I began reading books that are long and notoriously challenging in a new way. I would read 3-5 pages a day during my lunch hour and just keep plugging along until I was done. No hurry, no rush. This would allow me to keep reading other books at the same time that I actually enjoyed without shutting down all my reading by focusing on one long, hard to read book.
This all started with Joyce's Ulysses, continued with Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and Bolano's The Savage Detectives. The process worked. Keeping my daily reading program short allowed me to plow through dense material in a slow regulated way.
But my enthusiasm to continue reading 3-5 pages of Infinite Jest has waned. I'm still going...but admittedly not every day. I got to amp up the effort. But I find IJ overrated and tedious. It's supposed be one of the great works of my generation but I find it so pedantic. I am aware that this could be due to my intellectual deficiencies. Maybe David Foster Wallace is just too smart for me. I like his essays. And I like parts of this book. But a lot of it is meandering filler. Maybe I'm just too short-sighted to see the over-arching plan. But spending 40 pages on a simulated war game using tennis balls on tennis courts just wore me out man.
The work is obviously the work of a genius. Maybe a mad genius who's ideas came out rather sporadically in this case. I don't wish to speak ill of a great writer who suffered from mental illness. But I'm not really enjoying this as much as my other long term reading projects.
I had projected to be finished by January 2022. But I'm only on page 610. I still have 400 pages to go! This may take awhile. I got to get back to reading it every day. 600 pages in, and I cannot recommend this so far even if that makes other Gen X'ers upset with me.
