I just finished reading Infinite Jest in paperback. Wow! I just sent for a reader's guide so I can derive the most benefit from it; one of the ten-page footnotes did me in. It's so sad to read such brilliant writing by someone who was just too depressed to go on. What made it even more engrossing was that much of the book takes place in the EXACT part of Boston where I grew up in the 60's and early 70's (He even mentioned a street I lived on until I turned eleven!) and part of Cambridge, where I went to school in the mid-late 70's. His narrative of a tennis-cum-international-strategy game called Eschaton is just breathtaking!
I feel presumptuous mentioning my own humble offering in the same post as a book by David Foster Wallace, but War on the Margins has just been nominated for the autumn 2010
People's Book Prize. It takes just a minute to register and vote for it, or any other book on the list that you like.