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I decided this summer I was going to back-to-back the two "long, pretentious, abstract-ish" books I've been meaning to read for like 15 years now: Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest. I'm about 700 pages into IJ and I generally dig it, but don't really get the extreme fawning it gets - maybe it's because I didn't read it in college at an impressionable time in my life, but I'm on the side of people who say that I wish this book was like 500 pages total. I saw someone in the thread talking about how the long meanderingness is part of the overall goal of the book and writing style and point, but at least having not finished it yet, my thought is "nope. Shoulda been halved". Having said that, the book DOES make me want to read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. DFW seems like he would be a great short story writer: being able to show everyone "look how good I can write in a bunch of different styles!" while being contained to small chunks, rather than IJ where he seems to be having the same need and going "ooh, I didn't write 20 pages yet about how the tennis academy assigns chore duty to clear the way to get their inflatable court out of storage! gently caress yeah lemme do that!" There's some absolute poetry in this book (Joelle ritualistically smoking crack in the bathroom at the party was phenomenally written) sandwiched between a lot of "oh my god I don't CARE". Also, DFW sure does love writing about child sexual abuse in a lot of detail, hoo boy.
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Aug 28, 2023 12:00
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 23:25 |
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Ok I finished it and then looked up a “what happened with the ending?” Analysis and I picked up on NONE of the poo poo it describes
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Sep 1, 2023 03:53
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