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Comment by npilk | Hacker News Reader

Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)

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The first time I read Infinite Jest I was expecting something as inaccessible as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow but ended up finding the book pretty readable and a total delight. And but so I would highly recommend it, just take the off-beat sci-fi setting at face value and skip the footnotes if you feel like you want to focus on the story. You can always return to those later.

Yea, I don't really get the take that it's inaccessible. The footnotes are sometimes annoying, but usually they're hilarious.

I haven't read it in ~10 years but I think it's even more relevant, poignant, and hilarious today as it was then since we're just seeing more and more of his predictions about consumerism and self-image come to life.

I agree, quite accessible, despite its length. I personally would not recommend skipping the footnotes. Though they are a pain, they frequently add so much color and deeply-nested, parenthetical humor to the book. Occasionally you need to look up a word (which is always worth it, because he really knows how to pick the right word), occasionally you get bored in the middle of one of "those" chapters (likely an inevitability that you get some ups and some downs in a 1,000+ page book).

But I totally agree that it just gets more and more relevant and poignant. And completely hilarious. I think that part of the book (and his writing in general0 is undersold. Some of the passages are amusing because of their literary references and wordplay, some are laugh-out-loud funny, the type of stuff that you'll have to read back to someone else immediately because of the extreme mirth you just experienced reading it.

As Dave Eggers says in his introduction to the 2006 version of the book:

> A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who, just when he's about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good lowbrow joke.

Gotta love the diddle checks

Predicting the rise of video calling and the backlash against having to look like you’re paying attention and of being prettied up, solved by the face filters then people completely replacing themselves with virtual avatars?

Incredibly prescient.

"Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her"

Entertainment, addiction, corporate-sponsored years and tennis. It’s still pretty relevant!

I found Gravity's Rainbow more accessible and maybe that's because Infinite Jest was clearly inspired by it. They're both very similar in that you just have to power through the first 150-200 pages and then somehow everything starts making sense.

Okay, I want to discuss a major thing in the book, but it's really spoilery. I don't know if hacker news has a thing for that? I'll ROT-13 it and if anyone wants to respond please do. Again, you shouldn't try to read this if you haven't read the book and dont want to be spoiled:

V'ir arire frra guvf zragvbarq naljurer -- ohg vg frrzf gb zr gung gur npghny vasvavgr wrfg va gur obbx, nxn gur ivqrb gung ulcabgvmrf rirelbar, vf rffragvnyyl whfg na nfze ivqrb naq qsj unq uvf svatre ba gur pbaprcg orsber nfze orpnzr n guvat?

Vg'f infgyl zber cbjreshy guna gung, ng yrnfg nccneragyl, ohg bar pbhyq frr n cnenyyry. Vs V erzrzore pbeerpgyl vg qbrfa'g "jbex" ba crbcyr gung xarj Wbryyr crefbanyyl naq vg unf fbzr xvaq bs pbaarpgvba gb gur zlfgrevbhf qeht QZM, gbb.

Bs pbhefr. Ohg V'ir whfg orra fgehpx ol ubj 'nfze' qvqa'g ernyyl rkvfg nf n guvat ng gur gvzr naq V guvax vs gur obbx unq pbzr bhg gbqnl vg jbhyq or boivbhf gung guvf vf jung vg jnf irel zhpu yvxr vs abg vqragvpny gb, naq ntnva -- fb sne V yvgrenyyl unir frra ab bar znxr gung pbaarpgvba. V whfg svaq gung cneg ernyyl fgenatr.

Vg'f GvxGbx.

I cannot imagine reading this book and skipping the footnotes.

I've been roughly halfway through the book for years, so take this for what it's worth, but if they were actually footnotes I might have read them. Instead they are endnotes, meaning you have to pick up a solid pound of book and flip to the end each time you encounter one. And there are many.

I just found that dehumanizing. Lol

DFW said somewhere (I can't recall where) that he wanted the reader to have the physical experience of moving back and forth, and that the process of moving and flipping sort of echoed the jumping between the years of the chapters and story. Or something :)

I found it annoying initially, but after I read that (when I was maybe 1/3 through), I did come to appreciate it a bit more. Maybe I'm just impressionable.

The endnotes are fundamental to the experience. There are some key plot points divulged or hinted at there first (and sometimes there exclusively, IIRC). Pemulis' funniest moments are back there. I still find my mind drifting to the description of Cage III: Free Show from J.O.I.'s filmography from time to time.

If nothing else, I once read a comment somewhere online that noted that the constant back-and-forth from text to endnotes and back is physically analogous to a back-and-forth in a tennis match. If thematic consistency in the third dimension was actually something DFW was going for, it's a shame you're only seeing half of the court.

Cut the book in half, literally. Or even just cut the footnotes out and make them a separate book.

You just need a second bookmark, and then you're good to go…

Yeah, or read it on a Kindle like I did and the jumping is pretty easy.

I was so immersed in the book on my first read-through I ended up skipping the footnotes because I found jumping between them and the main text a bit jarring. At that point I was certain I’d read this one again so it was also fun to have something saved up for later!

I think it helps to read summaries or explanations of infinite Jest and not just dig into it. Eventually you get a good mental picture of the entire timeline, the rough details of how the dystopia works and how the story is told in a loop.

"And but so"

If you write like this yourself it's no wonder you'd find it readable. Or in other words I see what you did there.

That’s fair. I ended up sort of skimming through it the first time reading the parts I could connect with and then picked up more of the detail (and the end notes) on later re-readings. For The Pale King, I was able to read it in depth from the jump. But that may also be because I was more mature and had read DFW before…

Infinite Jest reads like See Spot Run compared to Gravity’s Rainbow.

DFW's early short story "Forever Overhead" gives a sense of his potential and lyricism. [0]

It's one of my favorites.

[0] http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readi...

The link you provided didn't work for me. I was able to find another copy here: https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace...

I first stumbled across the Pale King in my local library, and it was indeed enough to get me hooked and read first one of the collected essay books and then Infinite Jest.

Spoiler: don’t read this unless spoiled

But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the child was the funniest chapter of a book I’ve ever read. And I recommend this book based only on this one chapter.

I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe something like it’s always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama comes slightly close. But I’ve never laughed out loud from a book like that.

As for comedy in books, I find Bukowski - Post Office to be quite hilarious at times.

And if you've read The Pale King, you can skip Something To Do With Paying Attention.

The content is mostly the same, seems like the release of the latter was a cash grab.

I liked the David Foster Wallace reader to start with. It was basically a greatest hits of his best material including a decent chunk of Infinite Jest.

...

Not to mention the pulleys and joists reasonably belong to the flagpole, not the flag or the rope (not to mention the rope doesn't belong to the flag, either)

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