"Infinite Jest"

There's not really much else that can be said about this book that hasn't already been said, so I'm not going to go into any sort of plot synopsis or thematic analysis. That would be cheating future readers. However, I will say that this was one of the few books that made me laugh out loud to myself while I was reading it. Not that I'm a tough audience to entertain comedy-wise, but you have to admit that it would take quite a funny novel to make you bellow on your couch, time after time, with no one else around. That said, I think there is a lot more to be said about the physicality of the book, even more so now than when it was originally published in 1996.

Today, of course, we have this swirling and enormous shift to electronic reading devices and digital texts, but Infinite Jest, due to its sheer size and monstrous, physical complexity, has single-handedly defied that shift. Yes, you could read Infinite Jest on a Kindle, but you would lose the excitement of paging back to reference the hundreds of essential (and wildly entertaining) footnotes. You would lose the challenge of basically having to read the book in one location (I read the entire thing on my couch; it was too big to take anywhere else without looking like a traveling monk deep in study). You would lose the epic feeling of watching your bookmark slowly travel down the binding as you chopped away at 1,100 pages and couldn't challenge yourself to see how far you could make that bookmark travel in one sitting (I don't remember a specific number of pages, but I once endured six straight hours of reading it, which must be some type of personal best for consecutive hours of reading in my lifetime). In other words, Infinite Jest is a big 'fuck you' to the Kindle, and will probably be the main reason that people still have bookshelves 100 years from now.