Oh, y’know that big book I was reading?

Well, I’ve finished it (again). There may be more frequent posts here now that that mammoth task is completed.

On this read-through I didn’t feel the need to go back to the start and read the first chapter again, instead I clambered into bed and fell asleep for 6 hours. In the middle of the day. It’s like my brain went “Whoa! I’m plum tuckered out after all that!” and required a serious nap-type reboot. Poor brain.

The cover of my (previously) unsullied and brand-spanking new copy is now bent and worn, the back cover folded itself in half somehow when I fell asleep reading one night. Also, as a general tip, if you’re reading in bed and marking up passages with a biro, try *not* to fall asleep before capping the pen. There were multiple mornings where I awoke to find eldritch scribbles on my leg, which puzzled me greatly til I had had my coffee (and woken up brain) and was able to deduce from whence they came.

I’m not going to post anything now about the book, I have some ideas for an IJ-related post for later. I just wanted to stick my head in the door and wave – I’m still here.

Still (re)reading Infinite Jest…

and having a lot of fun, spent Sunday afternoon falling around laughing at the Eschaton sequence (and thinking about game-theory and hacks/exploits, and feeling generally kind of sorry for Ann Kittenplan (why I do not know, I giggle at her and cringe for her simultaneously)).

This morning I had a look through the twitter stream for #infsum and saw manys the link to this blog post. Which is a wonderful read for anyone – reader of IJ or not, as long as you have a funny-bone and an interest in social media/ipods and suchlike whatnots.

Go on over and have a read…

As for me, I’m still behind (tho not very many pages behind) where I should be in IJ for #infsum, but that’s ok because I started way late and am taking my time with it.

Right now, I’m about to look up some of the vocab that stumped me while I was reading last night – prognathous? fremitic? – and then settle down for more reading today.

I’m half-way through now, so normal blog service will probably resume in a week or two….

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?

What a wonderful idea….

Been doing a lot of what I’d call “comfort reading” of late, fun, entertaining, undemanding stuff that makes it easier to be stuck at home with a bad back, and whiles away the hours between pain meds doses agreeably. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all.

Trouble is, I have time on my hands, and I promised myself last year (yes, in September, after hearing the sad news, and probably like many others) that when I next had time on my hands I’d use it to re-read Infinite Jest.

I went so far as to order myself a new copy (my old one being loaned to someone, oh a decade back, who never gave it back, possibly since they haven’t finished it yet, possibly because they didn’t want to give it back), bought it, and then it got lost under an avalanche of DVDs, computer games, and proofs. Every so often I’d see a speck of the sky-blue cover winking at me from under the debris and would tell myself “Not now, no time”. Because it is a book that demands, and rewards time. Because I remember struggling with it back when I was younger and more adept at book-mark juggling (I wasn’t long out of college when it was published) and because there were times when I was completely lost, and unsure whether to persevere or not. It is a hefty tome – my new copy rolls (thuds?) in at 1079 pages (including the wonderland that is the endnotes). But persevere I did, and I was glad of it.

I know I’ll be just as glad to have re-read it, and to be truthful, I don’t know why I kept putting it off.

Serendipitously, while wandering the archive of Books posts over at Salon, I came across an article about a world-wide online project to read Infinite Jest over the course of this summer. It’s called Infinite Summer and if you click on the name you’ll be whisked away to the front page. It’s set up more for those who never read the book, or who gave up part-way through, but the mere existence of the site, and the project (78 pages a week from June to September – ack, I am behind!) was enough to make me dive into the pile of debris, rescue my pristine copy (won’t be that way for long if memory serves), drag together a flotilla of book-marks and the all-important notebook, and resolve to start re-reading today.

I’m posting about it because (a) I won’t be reading anything else for quite some time and (b) if you’ve never read Infinite Jest this is the ideal way to do it, with a bunch of other people reading it for the first time, so you may like to get your mitts on a copy and join in. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

(in case any of you thought I was kidding about the preparations – here’s a photo of my “ready to start” copy and accessories….when I finish the re-read I’ll post an “after” photo)