Infinite Jest

conspiracy involving a tennis academy and a guy blowing up his head in a microwave

I don't agree. DFW uses really obscure, technical, and non-laymen vocabulary. Not to mention the twisted use of foreign languages. Or malaprops, neologisms, accronyms, slang, codewords, etc. Notes are very helpful. I probably would have had to pick my phone up and google a word 500 times if I wasn't reading along with annotations.

And an cross-dressing spec-ops agent in opposition of a group of wheelchair bound assassins trying to locate a film that lobotomizes people when they watch it.

Is it Brief Interviews XXL?

Not the howling fantods?

Consider eliminating your map

ESL or brainlet?

Infinite Jest isn't even difficult

I’m half way through. It’s not a hard read, just massive and indulgent. Jump in, I think it’s been great up to this point.

What do annotations take away from you, pride? If you knew everything referenced in IJ and didn't have to google anything then I must be a brainlet.

Same here. It’s long, but not what most would consider difficult.

No? Just read it you can get by. You would only need to take notes and use external dictionaries if you planned on trying to understand everything explicitly which is what simps do. You don't need to understand everything you read 100% there is such a thing as implied knowledge where you can fill in the rest of the picture given enough parts. A book shouldn't be "spoiled" because you don't know some obscure 19th century adjective- all you need to do is understand basic context. You're not going to enjoy life very much if you're limited by your own arbitrary limitations you put on yourself.

It's a story about addiction and media and the things people do to occupy their mind as they wait for death. It's a good book with many interesting characters. The story is about a young kid at a tennis academy who's trying to get right with his father, who made a film that kills people. There's also a group of cripple seditionists and Don Gately, the real hero of the story.

This. It's definitely not par with something like Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses. Even Book of the New Sun is wordier.

What does not understanding every aspect of a novel on the first read take away from your pride?

I really don't get your point. W

He doesn't even talk about anything that deep and regardless the narrative itself had it's points pretty firmly embedded in the stories. I'm not big brain IQ I'm dumb as fuck and didn't google anything and I read the book and it was good. I read the footnotes too, which were mostly just references to drugs or back-story.

Sorry, perhaps some kind user will annotate it for you.

is it even worth it to read it?

Underrated post

user needs to retire after that pwn

Sick burn but in all honesty annotations are great and I love my annotated Lolita.
Pisses me right the fuck off when authors don't bother with footnotes for quotes in other languages.

I never said that using annotations made you a brainlet, but the annotations are definitely not a 'necessity'. The thing that I missed when reading first time and that I honestly don't believe anybody figured out on their own was all the shit that happens between the end of the book and the opening scene, I can see that someone would pick up that Hal changed because of DMZ and connect it to the mold (the toothbrush theory seems a bit more of a reach) but how the fuck would anyone figure out that Joelle visited Don at the hospital and saw Hal their and then that Hal and Don dug up Himself's head (this is mentioned twice but one of those times is a single sentence at the very beginning before you know who Don is and the other time is among dreams so there's no reason to believe it's an accurate vision of the future or whatever and it doesn't even mention Hal by name) which had a cartridge in it (what the fuck, this is also mentioned once that I know of in a context where you have no reason to believe it). This spoiler may look massive and seem like I'm saying I missed a lot, and I did, but when I put the book down after finishing it I was overall satisfied even if the ending didn't resolve things much, until I went on the Internet and found that apparently I'd missed that massive amount that literally isn't in the book and you're supposed to figure out, but honestly I didn't need to know that plot point to be satisfied with the book.
As for the language, yeah there are words like 'hirsute' that I'd never heard of before and sections filled with technical language like the bit where Madame Psychosis reads out about the different types of ugliness and disfigurement, but he literally explains a lot of things and the sections of technical words are generally dense but far between, and it's OK to miss some bits. The acronyms don't take long to get used to, apart from C.T. which admittedly took me way too long to get, and the neologisms and slang are easy to pick up for a native English speaker. I figured out what Nuck meant immediately because of the context and the fact that Canuck is a word that actually exists. In English phrases involving 'giving someone the ________' often mean to scare them, and 'howling fantods' is obviously no different. I can't really explain how I figured out 'map' immediately but I did.
Anyway OP, just read it. If you think you'll like it then you probably will, and it really isn't difficult, it's just long.

Is that really where people quit? That was one of my favourite parts of the book.

>annotations are great
Sure, annotations are great. My point was that you should not be worried about getting every single detail when you first read a book, it is not going to happen even with annotations. Any author worth reading is going to make sure that everything important in the book will be able to be grasped by the average person, the rest is just set dressing, makes it more lifelike. You loose a great deal in books, and life, if you worry about needing to understand everything, save that stuff for later. Personally I think doing research oneself is better than using annotations done by others.

>footnotes for quotes in other languages.
Part of life, you are not always going to understand everything you hear and you will not always be able to ask, why should books be any different?

Don't read The Magic Mountain then lol

Take my advice: it’s easier to wrecklessly plow through a book and let the unknown words hit you like stray branches. You won’t see the details but at least you’ll have walked through the woods with a fraction of the effort.

This is well put. Pr0 advice

bump

I see the point now. Maybe it's just my autistic or obsessive manor that bugs me when I don't pick up on something the author is trying to relate. There's something to the idea of not understanding what the author doesn't necessarily want you to understand.

That being said, I feel like reading this book w/ annotations allowed me to learn some really cool words and more importantly, better understand or envision curtain scenes. e.g. the gruesome rare medical conditions, cool optics terms like Brocken spectre and Brewster's angle, and references that I would never even have known to look up. For instance, "Luther's 16th-century shoes, awaiting epiphany" is an allusion to the face that Martin Luther's suffered constipation.

Really I don't think it matters in the end which way you read the book, it was just fun jumping in and out of parts of the page to pick up on the little fun things DFW put in the book that I might have missed. Are annotations necessary, no, I was wrong about that. Are they a fun and viable way of reading for some people, yes.

>This spoiler

Yeah. I don't know that anyone got all that other than people who thought to reread the opening after finishing. The other big plot detail was that the footnoted dates for ONAN basically go up to just after the end of the book, which is more obvious, but I still missed it.

I think the Hal breakdown thing is sort of shit though. There's a few different theories, but nothing too authoritative.

kek user on microwave watch

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Tempted to give this a go - is it actually worth the time investment? I don't care that it's long as long as it's rewarding.

it genuinely is. all the memes here asides it's definitely worth the investment, some of the ideas hit harder than others but by the end each thread will pay off in an interesting way. also it's pretty self aware that it's treading a thin line between pretentious irreverence and preaching pseud/profound importance and sometimes deals with that in great ways.

What this user said

I'll give it a stab then, thanks.

Nah you dont need notes desu, if youre really confused about a chapter use litcharts. Its a great book op well worth the read

Too Late, the master is not in there, Orin dug it up earlier and used it to kill all the people that fucked Avril in defense of his love for his father. The wheelchair assassins torture him with roaches and get the master and use it to destroy America because (obviously) Americans can't help but watch it, US society crumbles to the point of intercontinental war (fighter planes heard flying overheard while Hal sperges out in the Arizona college bathroom) and since Hal didn't watch Infinite Jest while on the DMZ the Wraith stole from Pemulis' ceiling hiding-place he has the purely anti-Entertainment (DMZ) experience of projecting outward without the Entertainment (IJ) experience of generating something inward which are meant to work in conjunction to bring out a happy communicable experience that Hal has lost since ingesting the mold (American techno-capitalist socialization during puberty) and supposedly in the manuscript Ortho Stice's original nickname was the "Wraithness" so maybe while his head was stuck to the window, Himself got into Stice's body, since Stice did feel someone's presence behind him, and "communicates" with Hal by playing against him at the Whataburger through Stice's body and can hear Hal's inner-thoughts, like we read at times but no one else could hear Hal say and just how Himself could hear Gately's mind without him speaking

Well, you all did it, time to read IJ again.