Top 10 Reasons Why David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest Is Pissing Me Off

10. My hardcover copy of Infinite Jest is close to 1,000 pages long - close to 1100 if you count the footnotes. I'm a little over 150 pages into the thing and am reminded of the exact moment when, as a teenager, I decided to stop reading Stephen King. The last King novel I bothered with was The Tommyknockers. Somewhere between 200 and 250 pages into the thing, I realized I had yet to get the slightest inkling of what the fuck was going on. All I remember now is that some woman was digging up something in the woods, some poet was heading to the woman who was digging up the thing, and some guy was fantasizing about titfucking a postal worker. While I had enjoyed other phone-book-length works by King like It and The Stand, The Tommyknockers just didn't hold the same interest and the effort hardly seemed worth it. I mentally made a note that if I ever became a bestselling author I wouldn't hate my editors as much as King obviously did, and probably went and read a comic book.

9. If you read my blog a couple of days ago you might recall that I have recently decided, in order to help my writing, to keep a notebook with me while reading so that I can mark down any words I don't know the definitions to and find the meanings later. Infinite Jest is making this ridiculously hard. I've filled over two pages of a notebook - with two rows per page - with words found in only 66 pages of Infinite Jest. Crepuscular. Murate. Mythopoeia. Carminative. Agnate. Erumpent. Ileum. Pimatribe. Sangfroid. Creosote. Osseous. And I can guess the meanings of most of the words by how he uses them, but I said I would look them up and write them down, and if I want to stick to the code I have to do it. Verbose bastard.

8. As mentioned in #10, though a novel, Infinite Jest has approximately 100 pages of footnotes. Many simply clarify references to real and (maybe, I don't even know) fictional drugs. But some are actually chapters all to themselves. It can get a little frustrating finding your place in the story after spending Hulk knows how long reading the damn footnotes.

7. Because of the footnotes, I'm actually using two bookmarks - one for the story and one for the footnotes section. I just don't like carrying the thing around. I feel like people are going to see me with this big-ass book with two bookmarks in them and think I either read novels in a very strange manner, or that I'm just a republican moron.

6. Reading a page of Infinite Jest is not like reading a page of another novel. It is sometimes a bit like reading 19th century British literature in that Wallace finds ways to make sentences last for days. Many chapters are just one long, square, daunting paragraph. And each paragraph contains at least a half-dozen sentences that stretch on and on, particularly when he uses the voice of one of his more uneducated characters and purposely misspells every other word in doing so. Like writing "pernt" instead of "point."

5. I try to read at least a novel a week. I read a lot, but I'm no speed reader. And I limit myself to one novel in part because I'm usually also trying to read one non-fiction book and perhaps a book of poetry or drama at the same time. I worked it out. Reading Infinite Jest in one week would mean reading around 150 pages of it per day. I could read 150 pages of just about any novel in a day, but not Infinite Jest. So I decided to give myself two weeks for it instead. That means about 66 pages per day. And it's still a fucking monster. I've considered extending it to three weeks, but Christ I'd like to read another novel sometime this year.

4. No Hulk.

3. Glen Danzig.

2. In spite of everything, it truly is an incredible novel. So, unlike The Tommyknockers, I just can't shove it back in my bookcase and forget it.

1. At one point I find myself reading one of the longer footnotes listing the filmography of the main character's dead father, which include things like documentaries interviewing actors who are named John Wayne but are not the John Wayne everyone knows about, realize the music I'm blasting in my living room is a punk-tinged, surf-rock instrumental by the only band I like whose name ends with a question mark - Man or Astroman?, and the only other band I know whose name ends in a question mark is Therapy? and they suck though their cover of "Where Eagles Dare" by The Misfits is actually not bad - that the name of the instrumental is "The Man from F.U.C.K. Y.O.U.," and realize that no, no, I really AM one strange motherfucker.