This was unironically a good book.

>>9824688
Literally impossible to finish. I seriously doubt anyone really has finished it.

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>>9824699

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>>9824699
I now for the first time know what it feels like to honestly have finished a book that somebody on lit says is "impossible to finish"
doesn't feel as good as I thought it would desu

>>9824688
By ignoring them and actually talking about the book

Where the hell do anons live where the average person knows about IJ? I hear people talk about it like everybody's (attempted to) read it, but the only person I've ever spoken to who knew DFW existed was an english major at harvard.

>>9824688
Tell all the women you date to read it.

>>9824760
I literally see pictures on Instagram of dumb trendy Mac DeMarco-loving girls posing with IJ placed not so subtlety in the background purposefully so some guy will comment "whoa are you reading IJ??"

>>9824716
you let your eyes comb over the pages, but you didn't really read it.

the OP is stupid. dfw is honestly one of the hands down most impossible to read writers when he's in a certain mode. infinite jest isn't always in this mode, but when it is, you want to give up, because it's just not worth your time and skipping that section or skimming it creates anxiety that you're missing some key to the book (you're not, by the way) which is an impossible bind

there's no way normies read it. they skim large parts of it at best. they get nothing out of huge parts of the novel. idk the whole situation just demonstrates the absurdity of literature and art in the first place. no one knows why they're reading it and yet hundreds, thousands, millions will continue to

yes, within that rambling muck there are little bits of goodness but finding a handful of these for yourself doesn't make it a good novel, a well-crafted piece of long-form literary art

>>9824964
Are you serious? He's the easiest of all the experimental meme authors. He's likely my favorite due to his subject matter really hitting home for me, but he's not the best - he's sure as fuck not the hardest. I'm sorry, if you really have that much trouble with anything he wrote, you need to go back.

>>9824964
From the top of my mind, Mario's puppet show is like the only truly, truly tedious section on the book. Maybe the game of eschaton, too, but not really. And they aren't even hard, just boring. Everything else is perfectly easy to follow. Normies loves IJ.

>>9825247
Two of my favorite parts, bud.

>>9825186
>>9825247
>>9825268
the psueds are out in full force tonight!

>>9825569
Ah, the old "everyone who's more intelligent than me is pretending!" strategy. Keep going, I'm interested in seeing how that works out for you.

>>9825571
It's working out great since it hurt your ego so much you replied in under 30 seconds. Reply again Anonymous Smart Man.

>>9824688

It's a fine book, judge it while you read it, don't get preoccupied with memes and teenagers.

>>9825580
I'll continue to reply. This is literally my favorite thing about this board, watching the idiots repeatedly claim that anyone who doesn't have trouble with easy literature is faking it to look smart. Seeing that level of denial on here, daily, gives me the biggest laugh of my night.

>>9825247
>From the top of my mind, Mario's puppet show is like the only truly, truly tedious section on the book.

Anyone here find the theatre section where Oedipa watches a play in the Crying of Lot really fucking tedious? I just wanted it to be over, it was so boring

>finish the book
>have to reread the first few chapters in order to make sense of it all
it's never over

>>9826738
>I thought to myself, while stating blankly at the vaguely Mediterranean tiles of the bathroom floor with the coarse, hairy, possibly white with strain and used to drink a five-dollar coffee on his way to the office this morning, thinking inauspicious thoughts on what he expected to be an completely inauspicious day, knuckles of the senior tennis coach, all coalescing into a semantically concise feeling of utter bewilderment possessed of an undeterrant refusal of facts to bulwark the notion that life had complete hijacked life itself, "Hal, my boy, it seems we really are just players in a long game called Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace with a forward by David Eggers."

>>9827007
>forward

>>9824964
pleb

>>9825247

pleb these two parts are great, eschaton one of the best scenes in the whole book.

>>9824699
speak for yourself anon, if you can commit yourself to 70-80 pages a day you'll be able to finish it in two weeks. (i think it took me about 15-16 days personally). The prose will 'kick in' at about the 150 page mark (which is usually what happens with books like these eg. Recognitions, JR, GR, ect.), and the book actually maintains a pretty standard pacing throughout. There are some little stories that feel extraneous at times (eg the silent little companion with the dog/cat killer, with whom we learn about his entire family and a particularly traumatizing christmas prank), but I didn't ever feel I was being "led on" or having my time wasted as a reader. Some of the books little vignette's, like the tennis player who plays the entire game with a gun up to his head, threatening to off himself if he loses, are pretty fucking great.

>>9824709
underrated

>>9824760
Go to Socal/norcal/most places along the east coasts. You'll see a lot of posturing tryhards on instagram/youtube especially who consider the book especially moving without even having read it

>>9824964
your an idiot. IJ can be a bit dry and technical at times yes, but as long as you 'look for the joke' in every paragraph or sentence, you'll be fine. It's clever, and every well developed thought or metaphor will usually have two or three little layers of meaning from a David Lynch surrealist take to a Hamlet reference to some tongue in cheek math joke that any first year undergrad can understand if he isn't a total mouthbreather.

>>9825186
He might very well be the easiest. Barth at times can be a little easier but can also (in books that aren't his first three) be outrageously technical.

>>9824688

normies only know the television version
aka
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

he keeps saying "I keed, I keed" over and over again

infinite jest

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>>9824688

Could someone please link me to an analysis that redeems this book from the tedious doorstop that it appears to be?

Keep in mind that I understood most of the references.

Or use the thoughts from your head too, that's also acceptable.

Surely someone out there must have felt compelled to break down even part of this BRILLIANT, TIMELESS NOVEL so that the idiots can understand why it's worth reading all 1000 pages.

/r/ing all the DFW pastas

>>9827698
At least 6 plotlines (addiction, media, nationalism, bildungsroman, political thriller, slice-of-life, etc.)
Dozens of characters.
Conservative estimate of 150 pages for an average plot's length.
150pp * 6 = 900 pp
Pretty close to IJ's page count; over, in fact, if you exclude the footnotes.
I never understood the issue with the book's length people had.

>>9827698
IJ is addictive to young men who believe that its voice sounds like the inside of their head, though it really only sounds like what they wish the inside of their heads sounded like. This is part of its unintentional genius.

The main narrative, literary, formal protest of IJ is a revolt against the hero. The reasons for filling out every minor extra in excruciating detail is given in the "Gatley talks to a ghost" section which closes the main text, and you can tell who failed to read that far by who fails to notice that Dave gives his whole program away by having Gately tell it, via mind meld with the wraith JOI (who narrates the entire text, with the possible exception of a few pages by Lyle, who is also a wraith.)

The appeal of an anti-hero narrative which glorifies the broken, failed, insignificant figures in life, especially in cities, and of school age, should also explain its meme status here, at least for the self-aware.

The complete absence of three dimensional female characters also, etc. The head of the halfway house is a man in drag, for all practical narrative purposes. The female students are all caricatures. "Face like a toltec death mask," Carol Spodek masturbating with her racket handle, the entire dismissal of feminine dignity in the "Heather or whatever" tennis instruction bio - Dave's work is a sausage fest because women get treated like that more than enough in real life.

Since naivete is the Arch American Sin, and the Ultimate American Virtue is being smarter than everyone else, it also makes perfect sense that a book whose main emotional impact on readers is to make them feel smarter than they are should also come as no surprise to a board whose only aspiration is to appear to have understood the work of a profane Irish clerk, who was himself damaged, petty, and insignificant, at least until a 20th century industry in crypto-communist deconstruction elevated him to its Olympian throne.

Having said all that, the Eschaton is probably the anthology short fiction of his whole wing of the literary world. The rest is a half-million word suicide note.