Your thoughts on Infinite Jest

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IJ seems to be a love it or hate it novel and I'm not 100% sure it's up my alley.

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Yeah, when I finished it I threw the book in the ocean because I was so pissed with the ending. And it was a real slog to get through. But parts of it were so compelling I had to go back and give it another go. Now I'd say it is my favorite book and I've probably read it 7 or 8 times. But I'd say it's not for everyone and you'd better be willing to invest a LOT of time. There's a lot of dark humor and it's very funny at times. And other times it's quite sad and tragic and deals with addiction and depression. It also has a couple of hundred pages of footnotes, some of them long and with their own footnotes. Don't expect to really understand it without a re-read or two at least. But I also think it is worth it.

375 pages in. Some of it is a real slog. There are moments that are so clever that they keep me reading, but often times I resent the book. His energy for words is amazing, but dang it could be a perfect book if he just used the best 300 pages.
In honor of 90s tennis:
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I "enjoyed" Gravity's Rainbow in the way that you're supposed to enjoy a difficult, trying book, but I really authentically liked Against the Day.

For anyone who hasn't ever read DFW's non-fiction, I can't recommend the collection of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again highly enough if you enjoy his "funny" writing.

"Shipping Out" which was originally published in Harper's is available here:
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Finally... if you like wildly verbose writers with complex prose.. check out Neal Stephenson if you haven't already. I really, really love the Baroque Cycle... but Seveneves is also fantastic.

I enjoyed Infinite Jest more than Gravity’s Rainbow. I watched a few YouTube videos before during and after the read to make sure I was getting it and help on the way.

A book I enjoyed more than both though was JR by William Gaddis. Hilarious book. Currently working my way through The Recognitions which I do not like as much as JR but is supposed to be inspiration for both IJ and GR.

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JR by William Gaddis

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OK, ordered on Audible.

One I'll throw out is Underworld by Don DeLillo. David Foster Wallace was a fan of DeLillo's and they wrote to each other fairly often. Supposedly DFW paid homage to DeLillo with some of the content of Infinite Jest, not sure exactly where, maybe with the waste disposal theme. Underworld is really not difficult, and the first section is brilliant.

Please come back to this when you finished it. I’m curious how it is on audiobook. There is no speaker attribution for the dialog so when reading you have to pick up on language to know who is talking.

I read white noise by Delillo but did t really enjoy it. I’ll have to check out underworld.

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Please come back to this when you finished it. I’m curious how it is on audiobook.

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(This is about JR by Gaddis)

I'm half way through (18 hours of the 36 left to go), and decided to give it a rest. The audiobook is probably much easier to get through than reading the book, because the audiobook makes very clear who the speaker is. It's really not difficult, but I have to say that I'm pretty meh on the book. Partly because it was written in 1975 and it feels like it's going over territory that has been beaten to death since then. Other than being dated, a few of the characters are speaking more in the voice style of the 1930's rather than the 1970's which is a bit odd. Honestly I'm pretty bored with the scenes featuring the principal and the stock brokerage. JR is fun though, and I generally like the scenes with Gibbs and the aunts. JR's story reminds me of the RAMJAC story line that Vonnegut used in Jailbird a few years later. I'll probably finish it at some point, but I'd just had enough and was on a long drive. I started Dungeon Crawler Carl instead, and that made the drive a lot less tedious.

Try Slow Learner which is a collection of short stories.