Sipped Ink vol 1 issue 0.5

Introduction

Dear future reader, you will note some strikethroughs below. Things like the original schedule have been lost to the mists of time, and I’ve tried to save you the trouble of following links that are now dead.

Five summers ago I failed, for the third time, to finish David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest. In mid-June 2006 I was keyed up to take advantage of a co-ordinated, online reading of the book organised by self-described ‘endurance bibliophiles from around the world’ at Infinite Summer. By some point in July I’d put the book aside. At a distance of five years’ remove I can’t recall exactly why, but it most likely had something to do with my internet-atrophied attention span - I probably got distracted by something shiny.

For background, this was the summer before I started an MA in English & American Literature - a course on which I would take a Postmodern Fiction module with some monster novels on the syllabus. I slogged through Pynchon’s V (496 dense pages), loved pretty much every page of DeLillo’s Underworld (832pp), and enjoyed getting thoroughly twisted up in the labyrinth of Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves (709pp). More recently I made my way through all 1,328 pages of Murakami’s 1Q84 despite losing interest somewhere in the triple-figures of page count. Believe it or not it was this experience that convinced me I was ready to take on Wallace’s magnum opus again: if I could stick out a novel that seemed to move at the pace of a pitch drop, the effort of spending an hour with which was rewarded with a scant few pretty sentences, I could surely re-commit to the endurance test of subjecting myself to David Wallace’s pyrotechnic prose and multi-threaded narrative.

In my experience, reading Infinite Jest is nothing like reading any of these other novels. If you haven’t read Wallace before, I can’t stress enough how brilliant he is. He’s capable of things on the page that you almost wouldn’t believe, but he asks a lot of the reader - and I do mean a lot. For one thing, famously, there are several footnotes in Wallace’s fiction that run to multiple pages, there are footnotes that have footnotes (that have footnotes), and he is not averse to using them to go to ridiculous, meticulous lengths to explore some avenue or other that you might not think he needs to. Likewise at the scale of the paragraph and of the sentence: Wallace constructs both so compactly that they feel simultaneously like intricate clockwork apparatuses and coiled springs about to go off in your mind. I’ve read most of the short stories, most of the non-fiction, and his other (unfinished) long(ish) novel: The Pale King (2011). I feel ridiculous worshipping the page Wallace is printed on yet never having seen the end of Infinite Jest - this year I’m doing it!

To do so I’m lifting wholesale the 92-day schedule employed by Infinite Summer: starting Friday 1 August, through to Friday 31 October. Here’s a link to a schedule that shows what that looks like; note that though the paperback version is 981 pages long, that does not include the copious endnotes in tiny, tiny print: ~10 pages a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a commitment, some days more than others.

I won’t just be reading IJ during this time. I’ll have other stuff on the go as time allows, probably mostly Wallace’s non-fiction or Wallace-related material, or a re-read of Hamlet for reference. Partly that’s because I think that may be the only sensible way for me to tackle this again; I’ve learned from experience that I can’t swallow Infinite Jest whole. I’ll also be writing little pieces about the novel as I go, primarily as another way of keeping myself invested and engaged. Which is where you come in - maybe. I’d like to have people to talk to about Wallace’s novel, about Wallace’s sentences, and about Wallace. The more the merrier - it’ll seriously help no end to keep me going in those moments when Infinite Jest feels too much like hard work.

You are, of course, free to read the novel at your own pace rather than the very prescriptive one I’m going by. You are, of course, free to start, pause, finish, or quit the novel at any time you like without any kind of obligation whatsoever.

If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, or you simply have no other reading plans for the next three months (!) , or you have an Infinite Jest or Wallace-related tip, question, comment, or idea, send a line to ■■■■■{at}■■■■{dot}com or say hi to @■■■■■ on Twitter.

In case you’re undecided I’ll leave you with a link to some tips for how to approach reading Infinite Jest. It won’t be the last time I link to material compiled or composed by the folks behind the Infinite Summer project, to which this whole enterprise obviously owes a huge debt. My thanks go to them right here at the start, as well as to you for reading this far, which probably signals that you’re at least considering buying, borrowing, or taking out of the library or off of your shelf a copy of Wallace’s novel.

I’m excited. A little nervous, but excited.