The End

This Haiku Battle is ovah!

I am officially moving on. Well, not really – more like consolidating. From now through the foreseeable future, I’ll be collecting all my random thoughts and such here: Fistful of Crispy.

Enjoy, baby!

Author Most Likely to Make You Reach for a Dictionary

David Foster Wallace

I have no good excuse for initially purchasing Infinite Jest. I had never read Wallace before. The cover art was not especially attractive. The book was about the size and shape of two bricks lying side-by-side. Something told me to pick it up, and I’m glad I did.

When I began reading, I found a challenge on every page – all 1024 of them. Some of these challenges took the form of endnotes; some, the complicated timeline; some, the tangled relationships between the hundred or so main characters. Probably the most intimidating challenge was Wallace’s vocabulary. I’m pretty literate, so I’m not used to having to look up three or four words a page. In spite of the labor-intensive reading, I found I really enjoyed the experience of IJ (because an book that massive is definitely something you experience rather than merely read).

Since finishing IJ, I’ve read all of Wallace’s other titles, which include collections of essays and short stories as well as one other novel. I recommend all of them.