Yong (4/26): Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I'm calling this half a book because I didn't finish it. I know, I know, "If I counted all my half-finished books, then I'd be..." Well, ain't no way I'm even coming close to 26 books, and it lets me get rid of the awkward ".5" I've been carrying over. And I did read over 225 pages of it. Problem is the book is a thousand pages long. Plus another hundred pages of footnotes.

Got pointed in DFW's direction by our hostess with the mostest and a former student, not to mention the thousands of mentions in the media following his offing himself this year. I thought his graduation speech was amazing. This book may well be also, but I don't have the combination of stamina and patience and time--not to mention stubborn determination and additional library renewals--to wade through the chaff and glean the rewards dispersed among the thirty-odd intersecting storylines about tennis academies and substance abuse and Canadian separatism and filmmaking and Phoenix Cardinals punters and MIT radio shows and...

One thing that totally caught me unawares: this is science fiction. It's funny how science fiction has (mostly justifiably) a stigma associated with it, such that works that gain credibility in the realm of broader literature quickly move to disassociate themselves from the label. The Time Machine and 1984 are simply "literature". Despite receiving the Arthur C. Clarke award, Margaret Atwood insisted The Handmaid's Tale wasn't science fiction but speculative fiction. And so it is that I had never heard Infinite Jest referred to as anything except DFW's opus.

Well, it's scifi. And for now, it's partially read scifi.