This is your brain while reading Infinite Jest…

Whee… the re-read is going swimmingly. Am now on page 188 and slowly but surely catching up to where I should be on the Infinite Summer reading schedule.

For those of you who have never picked up Infinite Jest (perhaps because it looks like a “tendon-strainer” in terms of sheer heft, perhaps because you’ve heard about the forest of end-notes and the nested-yet-sprawling structure, perhaps because the mere idea of so many words, and so many characters, crammed between two covers gives you a case of the “howling fantods”) you’re not alone.

There’s not much I can say to persuade anyone to pick up the book that hasn’t been said more eloquently elsewhere, but I’m going to make a stab at it anyhow. There’s much mentioning of “synapses firing” in and around the book, y’know, the little mental spark that goes off when you hit an association, or a reference, or a clue (if you want to see it that way), and the joy of reading Infinite Jest (to me at least) is not just the sheer (and humbling and beautiful) humanity of the book but the collective energy of those little pings of association. To put it simply:

This is your brain:

This is your brain while reading Infinite Jest:

See what I mean?

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