Thread: Rate the last book you read
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Old 03-01-2021, 07:06 PM   #527
OssMan
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I have FINISHED Infinite Jest. It took me exactly 1 year.

I have a lot to say about this book, but also I don't know what to say. There are times when it is very brilliant or very funny or very sad. Usually a combination. There are also parts where it's extremely lucid, there would be multiple chapters where 90% of it is just some insanely detailed descriptions and observations of stuff and then something insane happens in the last few pages. I always felt like those conclusions compensated for the inanity though.

At some point though you have to be like respectful of your reader, and introducing 450 characters with weird names and details that are presented in a way that's just kind of hard to remember is like not nice. The aggressively non-linear nature of the whole thing made it so that I didn't really grasp what was happening until 700 pages in. It's incredibly difficult to read but it does feel rewarding when you're working through it, up until you realize the thing has no payoff. It's frustrating and it makes me feel stupid, like I am not "smart" enough as DFW is to understand all the different layers or some shit.

And now it's got me making up all these backwater ass stories for random people who may or may not even exist, like Kanye West starting riots outside of Wikipedia's HQ to get his Wiki page taken down, or a guy whose porn addiction gets so out of control that it ruins his family and leads his daughter to actually start acting in pornos and then the dad went to watch porn one time and saw his daughter getting screwed from the back and jerked off to it, and after he splooged he let the video keep playing, and the girl turns over for the male actor to splooge on her face, and the guy only then realizes that it was his daughter he jerked off to, and is like psychologically scarred from that, and now can not watch porn anymore, but is suffering from addiction withdrawal via kind of having his hand forced into quitting cold turkey, so he becomes like vegetative and turns to hard drugs, and now has just like totally addled himself. My brain is full of this shit now
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