I read about its themes, about entertainment addiction, customized media channels as a source of fragmentation, self-absorption, depression and loss of connection and community - things I care about and have thought about myself. The greatest amount of work for the greatest prospect of reward. Instead I read other things while going back to r/books regularly to find out what to put next in my queue.Īnd there it was, over and over again, that Mount Everest of Books. ”Infinite Jest” was a mammoth work held up as the highest of high-brow literature as well as a potentially life-changing experience, but difficult to get through and many gave up early, describing it as incomprehensible and pretentious. If I was going to spend time on fiction I wanted it to be good, and because of disappointments in the past I knew I needed to vet my candidates thoroughly.Īs I browsed, a book I’d never heard of before kept popping up. I started to hang out at Reddit’s book forum r/books looking for clues on what to read. īut I got tired of absorbing knowledge for no particular reason and wanted a different kind of reading experience. I’d long found literature interesting as a topic without actually consuming any of it because I felt it demanded too much time and effort for the payoff. About a year and a half ago I decided to start engaging with some Serious Literature after having consumed almost exclusively nonfiction for fifteen years and nothing but humor and science fiction/fantasy before that. I read it because I kept bumping into it. At over a thousand pages and at least as many grams, getting through it took more of my valuable bi-daily, semi-hour train trips than any other book has done or is likely to do. For the first time in half a year it did not also contain my copy of the 20-year anniversary edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. A few weeks ago the bag I use to lug my laptop to and from work lost half its weight over night.
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