So I’m going to be reading Infinite Jest this summer, inspired by an old friend who mentioned that she’d be reading it along with a whole internet group of people (at infinitesummer.org). I first attempted to read it about eight years ago, but didn’t get very far (68 pages, if the subscription card bookmark I left in there can be believed). While I recall liking much of what I was reading, it all seemed so daunting, what with the book’s massive size and so many footnotes. My only other experience with David Foster Wallace comes from The New Yorker: a few essays that he wrote and a profile they ran not long after his death last year.

There are quite a few books I’ve read part of and given up on, not because I didn’t like them, but because I felt inadequate to the task of reading them at that point in my life. I’ll set them aside intending to pick them up again a few years down the line (Ulysses, Moby-Dick, Gravity’s Rainbow, among others) when I’m older and wiser. Hopefully, this will be one book I’ll be able to remove from that list.