Okay cats.

Who's still reading?

I am 150 pages in... or I'm past the long diatribe against videophone calls.

When I do sit down to read the book, I get a lot of pleasure from it. He's an absolutely incredible writer, and his fits of genius are like fireworks.

But I don't have the toehold and foothold that I want. I slide away from the book because there is no, as of yet, discernible plot. I put the book down and don't pick it up for a couple of days, and where once I read on the train to and from work, now I listen to podcasts and play Fruit Ninja.

I'm not giving up, but I need to be bolstered to continue. Dad, are you still going? Mom? Sara, have you gotten any further? I need to hear the voice of my family! I'm sliding off the glacier and I need a rope to help me continue. I just read this list of upcoming books and I'm starting to wonder whether my time wouldn't be better spent reading the books on my nightstand.

I started to read this book because I wanted to, but also because I wanted a family activity while I'm so far away from you all. My question is: is it still a family activity?

Let me know! Talk amongst yourselves!

Fell off the wagon.

Due to an increased amount of busy-ness in my life, I fell off the wagon with this book. I hovered on page 60 for a while, and then stopped bringing it with me on the train.

I feel bad, but I am not surprised... Books like this always take me a while to get into. 1,000 page books are called doorstops because that's what they become sometimes.

But I'm climbing back onto the wagon today. I have iced coffee and a day off from all of my jobs, and I'm going to try to make it a quarter of the way through it.

Wish me luck.

Chiming in Finally

The main thing that strikes me is the use of interesting adjectival pairings. However, I'm left wondering just exactly what the imagery they conjure up is exactly.Case in point..."carbonated silence". Once I've thought about that for a bit, tried to imagine just what popping, fizzing silence sounds like (can it sound like anything or is it just an emotional fizziness that is bubbling up to the surface??) I realize that I've been a trifle inattentive to the narrative and have to retrace my steps to reread.

So it is a mental exercise and one that is good for me, but should reading be something that we must take like old-fashioned cod liver oil? Even if the cod liver oil is pleasantly masked in inventive prose?

my thoughts thus far.

sorry to be the late joiner on this. i only recently pulled the book out of the car after moving. my first thought as i started reading is, that we seem to come in without much information or explanation as to what's going on. i mean, i know he is sitting in the dean's office at some school, the tennis coach is pushing for Hal to be admitted. but the character is extremely eloquent in his head. not so much i guess out loud. then we jump to an internal dialogue regarding an addiction to marijuana. who names their kid Erdedy? On page 18, the last paragraph, he starts in on a tangent about answering machines. I could relate to the inner dialogue. like what cool things is this person doing that they aren't around to answer my call. I liked these descriptive sentences on page 27

"he could not even begin to try to see how the image of desiccated impulses floating dryly related to either him or the insect"

and

"they sounded yanked through a very small hole into the great balloon of colored silence he sat in"

I read up to page 33. I found the conversation between Hal and his Dad to be surreal. Mom, what's a pejorative clause? I have forgotten. I think the thing that interested me is that he (Hal) refers to the parental units as "Moms" and "Himself." The whole conversation discussion reminded me of the argument clinic by Monty Python.
My last question is, is Hal still only internally speaking?

This book is already wierd.

A word on why I wanted to read this book...

I have not had many mental exercises since I left school. Working for Apple was sort of difficult on some days, and the several dozen days I had as a Substitute teacher in San Francisco were challenging in their own way...

But reading Infinite Jest reminds me of reading the unfinished German novel A Man Without Qualities or stumbling my way through Stendhal's The Red and the Black, two books that I struggled with, wrote 20 page essays about, and put away without finishing. I was challenged, but I was also busy, back then.

It's weird to think I read those books 3 and 4 years ago, respectively.

Anyway.

I need a mental exercise. I need something that tries my patience a little bit, that makes me want to guess at themes and structure and characterization and time period. And Infinite Jest is fitting the bill.

I usually read and listen to music at the same time - I can't do that with Infinite Jest. Is anyone else having that same difficulty?

And as for reading posts, stop around page 300 and let everyone catch up.

Near Future?

Okay-maybe I missed it, but when is the story supposed to be set? I'm guessing the near future to the time the book was written, what with the "tele-puter" consoles with the Interlace entertainment cartridges and stuff. Interestingly, the phones seem very pedestrian; part of the tele-puter console, but with no video (Skype-ish) capabilities. He seems to have very accurately predicted video streaming a la Netflix, though. For me, it's interesting to contrast this view of the near future with Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Of course, Snow Crash was about future technology, where this story includes it (as a means to an end, I presume).

We haven't discussed reading limits-I've just kept going since some of the chapters are short, and they're not numbered. I'm currently at James Incadenza's exhaustive (and exhausting) filmography footnote.

Looking forward to finding out Hal's deal with internal-but no external, dialogue.

Chapter one-- we begin the book June the first

Let's start slowly and just read chapter 1. Then we can post our initial responses and reactions. Post should be-I hate to say "due"-let's just say completed by Thursday. We can set a longer reading chunk (notice I didn't say assignment??) after all posts are in.