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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

I've never been a big fiction reader, and I don't know how much time you spent trying his fiction, but I highly recommend giving Infinite Jest a shot.

I had to take a 3 month break in the middle of Infinite Jest (not recommended) and even then, finishing it was the most rewarding and somehow obscenely frustrating literary experiences I've ever had.

This accomplishment/frustration thing is also central to the book and is "the point" (really one of several). The fact that it still has that effect even when I know it was meant to is a testament to how well it worked.

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IJ is ~1100 pages and the writing style doesn't allow one to read quickly.

And while you are reading you are constantly wondering if this book is better than the 10 other books you could finish in the same amount of time. At around page 200 I concluded that it was not. But I am certainly glad I read those 200 pages.

Completely agree - IJ is one of the very very few books that I've outright stopped reading midway through. There were some very interesting aspects of how the text is constructed, but that stopped being new or contributing to the continued development/reading of the book for me to be worth continuing the slog.

I unashamedly like IJ, even though it's a white male nerd trope to like it and is the kind of thing anti-hipster hipsters will make fun of you for.

And, having said that: it's unfortunate but you probably need to get past the first third of the book to appreciate it. And that's a high-risk endeavor, because there are legit reasons why you might never appreciate it. True believers say you actually need to read the whole thing twice; I can't make myself do that.

I sat in stunned disbelief for a second after finishing the book before turning back to page 1 and starting in on it again. I only read the first few chapters/vignettes again, but I could see the allure in continuing. I didn't have the structure of the characters, the institutions and their relationships cemented in my mind until the book was nearly over. And after I started in on those first few chapters, I ran across a line from Hal which was to the effect of '... and I dug up the stuff in the garden with Gately...'

And I imagine these kinds of references continue throughout the book. References whose significance I wouldn't have picked up on without having first read the book. But more generally, I don't think I've encountered a work before on which I've vacillated so much between considering it brilliant or insufferable. Maybe that's part of what I find intriguing about it.

I like to approach it as a very large collection of DFW essays set in a fictional universe.

Same. DFW at least plumbed some of the psychological deep-end that I (apparently) have as a white male nerd. Such as: some confusing feelings about class and the relative merits of high- and low-brow art, and this strong un-expressed emotion (evoked in IJ chapter 1) of being fundamentally unable to make myself understood. (Not to say that I actually have anything important to say, but, on an emotional level, the sentiment is in there.)

I had a similar thought, but then a few hundred pages beyond that you get to some incredible stuff. The stories from the AA meetings and Don Gately's time in the hospital are fantastic

Just the filmography footnote and the 'game' later on are worth getting through the initial difficult pages, in my opinion!

Based on my experience and that of many of the Infinite Summer readers, the first 250 pages or so are really difficult, and it (generally) gets more palatable after that.

My tactic has been to read a challenge book (IJ, currently The Pale King) and then have a few easy reads to go along with it (Millennium/Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy, currently Fahrenheit 451).

When I want a book to make my head spin, I read the challenge one. When I want to end a long day of head-spinning at work, I read the easy one.

I can also recommend using the Infinite Summer blog as a companion. The bloggers often provide interesting viewpoints, as do the commenters, and they offer some (basic) help here and there to make the whole experience a bit more pleasant.

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