Literary Blog Hop Part 13: Before I Die

*The Literary Blog Hop is hosted every two weeks by The Blue Bookcase*

Don't tell me you didn't see this coming from a mile away. Surprisingly enough, I think it's the first ever Blog Hop post I make on Infinite Jest. Maybe it's because I didn't read it. Would make sense. But I have to read it before I die. Never before, a book has called me that much, before I even opened its pages. I know this is not very original, because Infinite Jest is hailed by hipsters as some sort of Bible, but I want to get beyond that. Wallace himself didn't really approve of blind approval or blind criticism and was an apostle of critical thinking, so I liked (more like LOVED) his previous works enough that I feel I owe him my best shot at his magnum opus.

And it

fucking

terrifies me.

The main reason is that I suck really bad at long novels. If it's not riveting like a motherfucker, I tend to start sleep-reading after two or three hundred pages. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is a perfect example of a thousand pages novel that is just fine, but the crazy amount of science data in that book just nailed me hard. I ended up with a very general understanding on the novel, but I couldn't give you a detailed summary to save my life. I'm sure you all have had similar experience. Nobody is a perfect reader. But I'm training. I'm going through John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany right now, a whopping 640 pages. So far I'm keeping focus, even if at times, it reads like the longest family movie ever.

The date is coming. Believe it or not, this year I planned my vacations in order to read Infinite Jest. Nerdy, I know. I want to at least start up well, so I can keep up with its punishing length, so in August, I'm locking myself in a cottage with Josie, my dog...and Infinite Jest. It's going to be a literary duel at sundown. A full week with only one thing to do. I have heard so many people say that Infinite Jest changed their lives, take that Broom Of The System review of Tori Sachant in The Rumpus last week. She couldn't resist but to make one third of her review about Infinite Jest:

David Foster Wallace was a writer with whom I was determined, out of principle, not to fall in love.

The hype! The fandom! All that geeking out! The angsty 18-year old girls with severe haircuts and ironic t-shirts toting around Infinite Jest like the goddamned Rosetta Stone! The whole thing smacked of hipsterism and zeitgeist in a way that I wanted to distance myself from. No, sir! No 1,000-plus page schizoid novel for this reader; I’ll take Proust for $800, Alex. Besides, he couldn’t be worth his salt—this multiple-named longhaired dude whom I occasionally mixed up with Jonathan Franzen.

But after my boyfriend finished Infinite Jest, rapturous and feverishly babbling about acronyms, I took a stab at it and fell hard—fell flat on my face in the way that feels like heaven when you’re crazy in love and running through a pine forest at dusk somewhere in New England. It was probably the only novel I’ve ever read that got me out of my depth in terrifying ways, but all the same left me laughing for full hours at a time— the only novel that altered my entire perception of what comic writing can do. To this day, I can’t say I’ve downright missed, longed for a novel the way I yearn for Infinite Jest.

I will find out for myself in August. But I'm scared my expectations are too high. I've never been that excited before reading a novel though.