A confession: I never finished David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
I started it, sure, but I never finished. In point of fact, I never got more than 100 pages into it.
I had just come off of Simon Schama's Citizens -- a history of the French Revolution that I enjoyed immensely -- and was feeling pretty full of myself, in terms of readership. IJ seemed to be the logical next step; I had read a review of it in "The New Yorker", and had been intrigued by it -- the titular conceit reminded me of the one Monty Python sketch where the military develops the perfect joke. I should have known better.
I didn't get far before I figured out that it wasn't going to be as easy as all that. I don't know what it was, but reading the book was just completely wearying, while not really yielding up too many reasons for me to want to continue. It was the literary equivalent of a minimum wage job.
Now, I have read some hefty tomes in my time. Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon is one of my favorite novels, and that was even written in an unfamiliar vernacular. I've read some of Salman Rushdie's larger novels -- Hell, I've even read the Bible for fun. I have not (yet) read Dickens, Thackery, Trollope, or virtually any Russian novel, but I have time yet, and they are all represented on my book shelves. I admit that my attention span isn't all that great, but if I feel like I'm getting something out of a book, I have no problem maintaining my attention. Problem was, it never felt like I was getting anything out of Infinite Jest.
Maybe that's a problem with me; maybe I just didn't get it. Maybe it just wasn't my cup of tea. There are plenty of authors I enjoy -- Virginia Woolf, Nathaniel Hawthorne -- that are not the names that come to mind when many people think of "reading for pleasure". I accept that -- in fact, I completely understand it. But I will not feel obliged to read something I don't enjoy just to prove something to myself, much less to anybody else. At least, not unless there's a grade at stake. There are too many good works of literature out there for me to spend that kind of time laboring over a book, and I don't have the kind of free time that I can spend that much time reading something I don't enjoy. IJ was something I found myself dreading to pick up. So I quit picking it up. In fact, I sold it for two dollars at a garage sale last year. I figure someone else could give it a shot; maybe they would enjoy it more than I did.
Meanwhile, I salute those who have finished it.
Song: The Magnetic Fields, "I Wish I Had an Evil Twin".
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2 comments:
I confess i never finished reading Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools. I just couldn't get into it...perhaps I didn't get it. It just bored me to no end. Ultimately, I rented the video and bluffed my way through it in class.
Wow. That was cathartic. ;-)
Ok, as long as we're confessing: I never finished the Chronicles of Narnia, because I got impatient, skipped to the last book and read the end, and all that apocolyptic shit pissed me off so much, I never read any of them again. I never finished Thomas Pynchon's V, just because it started to bore me, and I lost interest. I didn't finish The Hobbit the first time I tried to read it, in elementary school. I never finished a book of Lovecraft's short stories I own, because I was reading them while I was alone at my family's cottage in Indiana, with only my dog as a companion, and I became convinced she (Cybill, the best-tempered yellow lab ever) was going to devour me as I slept. I still have a low threshold for horror, I guess. I didn't finish Wuthering Heights, just because I had books to read for school. Worst of all, for the first two years of college, I rarely if ever finished a single book in my literature classes, including The Canterbury Tales and Pride & Prejudice. I have since rectified this.
Also, I never finished watching "Gone with the Wind". It actually offended me so much, I never bothered putting the second tape in to watch the ending. As far as I'm concerned, it's a piece of shit, and its continued popularity confounds me.
I feel physically lighter!
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