Infinite Summer

There's a website dedicated to reading Infinite Jest this summer. Lots of interesting material (e.g. How to Read Infinite Jest)

I, of course, am a huge, huge partisan of this book, so I hereby exhort you all to grab a copy of IJ and read it this summer.

I read Infinite Jest back in 2004, and it remains one of the most memorable reading experiences in the past 5 years. (There is actually a large amount of Jest-related material available on this blog, both from my own reading and that of other people who have read it and discussed it here.) It's one of those books that I hesitate going back to–because a second reading could hardly be as good as the memory of the first–even though in many ways I do want to read it again, to see what new thoughts I have about the book and to see how it has stood up to changes in the world of literature in the five years since I last read it.

There's another impediment to my return to Infinite Jest, which is simply the rest of Wallace's writing. I've certainly read a large amount of his non-Jest writing, but it seems somehow wrong to re-read Jest when so much of the writing from this author who is both hugely important and one of my personal favorites remains unread.

That is all to say, perhaps this summer you'll see some Oblivion- or Broom of the System-related posts up around here to help give you a little context for your reading of Wallace's masterpiece.

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