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Comment by ericzawo | Hacker News Reader

I'm really trying to start and finish Infinite Jest but the sheer girth of the book is discouraging me from bringing it on my commute.

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I am an advocate of ditching books you don't enjoy BUT

After the first ~300 pages, I began to understand how all the stories fit together and the book went from feeling like work to being a page turner I just had to devour.

My sister gave me IJ for christmas a few years ago, and I basically started reading it out of guilt. I will read 100 pages, I said to myself, and if I don't like it by then, I will drop it. I really expected to hate the book and drop it, but after 100 pages, I was completely hooked.

After the first ~300 pages, you also finally start getting endnotes that explain the obscure terms used so far, like TP, EWD, etc.

I started reading the physical copy and switched to kindle after a few hundred pages. I know it's not the "pure" way to read it but it improved my experience considerably. Not only does it make the book very mobile, but flipping back and forth between the footnotes is way easier.

If there's ever a book that I found better on an e-reader, Infinite Jest is it. The movement between the endnotes was so much more fluid and not having the bulk of the book itself was a huge plus. Still have a physical copy for the at home reading (been a bit since I read and want to go for a third go around) but the e-reader experience felt like the experience the book was made for, but preempted.

Oh that's interesting. I bought the hard copy specifically because I assumed it would be easier to flip around the footnotes. Maybe I'll give it a shot then.

It might depend on the ebook reader you're using. I'm using Marvin for iOS and while there's a bit of loading, it's pretty quick.

Speaking of Marvin, it's by far my favorite ebook reader. One thing I rather like, specifically in relation to IJ, is that Marvin has a journal function that automatically tracks all the words you've looked up and the stuff you've highlighted or commented on.

Seconding the Marvin recommendation. If you need an iOS ebook reader, look no further, and you can read Kindle books with it too, after downloading them via a Kindle app and shoveling them through a Calibre-powered format conversion.

It's a massive book, but it really is very entertaining as well. Give the first chapter a go, and if you're totally sucked in and laughing, you might be just glad that the book is as big as it is. If you aren't enjoying it on a page-by-page basis, it's probably almost impossible to power through. It's one of my favorite books, but it doesn't contain the meaning of life, or anything.

Tear/cut it into 3 pieces. The footnotes are one section and then cut the main part of the book in half. Connect the footnotes to the part you are currently reading

I really wish there were an edition with the footnotes inserted into the main body in some clean way. Like a quarter of the book is in those notes and many plot critical segments are buried back there.

Isn't that the point though? Its not meant to be an easy read. The writing requires a lot of attention in order to absorb its message and the book itself is physically difficult to read. The endnotes are Wallace's way of talking about two things at once.

Also there are multiple endnotes that you read more than once, so I'm not sure putting it in text would work.

Yeah, I get the same feeling.

Some footnotes are chapters in themselves (or have their own footnotes), and I couldn't shake the feeling that the confusion I felt upon realizing that I had still been in 'footnote territory' was entirely intentional, similar to his run-on sentences that have a very specific effect. I rather liked how reading an ebook version made it even easier to forget I was reading footnotes.

Also, one of my favorite jokes wouldn't work if he'd put the footnotes at the bottom of the pages.

This is similar to what I've been planning as a strategy for tackling "The Anatomy of Melancholy," taking it to a bookbinder and splitting it into like 5 or 6 200p volumes.

Taking on Infinite Jest as your introduction to David Foster Wallace is a little like getting started in rock climbing by tackling Mount Everest.

A much friendlier/more accessible place to start is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/0...), a collection of his essays. They're shorter, tighter and generally much better commute reading.

I actually find his non-fiction in general to be much more satisfying than his fiction. He was such a gifted guy, and so funny, but when writing fiction I just feel like he was un-grounded to anything relevant to me, just wandering in the depths of his pyrotechnic writing-for-its-own-sake. For example in _The Pale King_, as an English major with lots of experience deconstructing and analyzing texts, I can see how subtle and clever his portraits of the characters are, but after a while I find I just don't care, because the story isn't interesting me as a story. Reading his non-fiction, I feel like he's always getting somewhere, and it's usually much more interesting to me.

Not to detract from your overall argument, but dinging The Pale King for not getting anywhere is a bit unfair, what with him dying before completing it.

Also try "The Girl With The Curious Hair".

I will add this to my list, thanks!

I don't think I'm the first person to say this, but I've found it to be true: Most people give up in the first two hundred pages. But of those who don't, everybody finishes the book.

It takes a while to sink its teeth into you. But once it does, you won't want to leave the world he's built. As horrifying as it may sometimes be.

I'd guess a lot of people get lost around this point when he starts to spend a lot of time with the street addict, writing in POV-style broken english.

Lugging that brick of a book around with you everywhere you go for several weeks is intrinsic to the experience of reading it.

I literally bought a Kindle of the sake of reading Infinite Jest.

I independently highly recommend both.

Are the footnotes etc. well handled on Kindle? Going through the Disk World series right now and some books are great some a mess

The formatting of the footnotes was fine for me. Kindle's footnote navigation system wasn't really set up to handle pages long footnotes when I read IJ, but the latest update seems to have brought some improvements to that UI. Overall, IJ's footnotes should be very manageable.

Yes. I'd love an answer for this as well.

I'm reading it one sentence at a time. i.e. 20 minutes at a time ;)

I love Infinite Jest, but its not for everybody. If you do want to read it, I wouldn't recommend reading it on a commute. Its very dense and requires a lot of attention, and I don't feel like it would work well if you are in a place with a lot of distractions and hard cutoff times to stop reading.

I read it during my commute. I had ~40 minute uninterrupted on a train each way, each day.

It was problematic. During that period were the only times I ever missed my stops, both going to work and home. And that's with 2 voice announcements per stop over the train PA. Far too engrossed.

Also the closest I've come to getting seriously injured in the station because I refused to stop reading on arrival.

I can see how that happens. The thing that impressed me most about Infinite Jest is the incredibly deep introspection that the characters had. But the passages were very long, and because they weren't about actual stuff happening, its tough to just stop reading all of a sudden. You cant just jump back in where you left off. It wouldn't make any sense unless you were following the entire train of thought, which means you need to backtrack quite a bit.

I honestly have no idea how people read that book in public. I read it during the winter in my bedroom, which was perfect because there was nothing to pull my attention away and interrupt the experience.

I can say, for me at least, it's absolutely worth the investment.

Infinite Jest is a very compelling argument for the use of e-readers.

Get the ebook.

You know, I actually find it easier to read long texts in paper book form. The fact that I can see myself physically progress through the book is encouraging. Ebooks often just seem like an endless stream of text.

Ereaders usually show a percentage and either an estimate page number or (kindle) some arcane fraction. For me, seeing it go from 1% to 2% was a lot encouraging.

Reading it on an ereader/your phone might help.

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