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Comment by mohamedkoubaa | Hacker News Reader

Pro tip: never feel guilty about leaving a book unfinished. If it's taking too long to read, pick up the next thing on your list.

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My favorite rubric for this is: give yourself permission to put the book down and never pick it up again at page (100 - your current age). Which means that, yes, once your turn 100, you're allowed to judge a book by its cover.

Brilliant

One of the books I most strongly remember giving up on was “Infinite Jest”. I only got through a few pages and trying to read it just made me really angry. I don’t remember why exactly, but I remember very strongly that it was so unpleasant and annoying for me that I absolutely did not want to read any further. Regardless of how important this book may be according to some. I have no intention of ever picking that book up again. I might miss out on something, but I’m fine with that. There are plenty of other books to read.

Read [0] and wonder no longer — with the very important caveat that I too have not read Infinite Jest, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy. (I plan on reading it someday, and this has made me more interested in doing so.)

[0] https://mattlakeman.org/2026/03/26/infinite-jest-extraction/

I scanned it and it was very accurate to my recollection of listening to the audio book. There’s a lot of humor that didn’t work for me or this blogger throughout the book and the author had lots of racist stereotypes in there - I wasn’t sure if he was trying to tell us all of his characters were racist or that’s what he thought. If you do ever try this I would recommend the audiobook because the print book is huge and you get the footnotes inline in the audiobook and don’t have to ping pong back and forth a thousand times. I spend about 15-20 hours a week riding a bike and knocked the book out in about a month of working out.

At the risk of sounding* pretentious, the ping-ponging across the recursive footnotes is an intended and crucial part of the book. The whole "shattered narrative" was deliberately modeled on the experience of going through the expansion of television media and the balkanization of individual attention in western culture in the 90's.

Of course, that never slowed down, and we have bloody TikTok now, so it's not like it's a novel experience anymore. Read it how you like :)

*who am I kidding, I'm low-key doing an I Read Infinite Jest move. Judge away.

I got to the end and was very angry - it just felt like bad Bret Easton Ellis for the tennis plot (which is a low bar even then) and low grade Elmore Leonard for the drug rehab plot with lots of terrible jokes. There’s so many jokes one will find a few funny but he needed an editor. The speculative fiction parts are easy in hindsight to call off the mark except his riff on Quebec separatism in different direction, and the racism was pretty offensive.

I don't mind taking a long time to complete a book if the story is good. I just re-read a couple of Peter F Hamilton 1200 page tomes that took me over a month to complete (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained). However they were fun and I was immersed in the world building.

There are other far shorter novels I have abandoned after 70-80 pages because they're just not very good.

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