If you’re playing along at home with Infinite Summer, you need to be on pg. 63 today. I’m not, but I’m planning to play catch-up this weekend and hit Monday’s goal of 94 pages. For those of you who are on schedule, here’s an open thread; for the rest of us, here’s an encouraging primer entitled “How to Read Infinite Jest.”

Trust the author: Around page 50, you’re going to feel a sinking sense of dread, as it dawns on you how much stuff you’ll be asked to keep track of: lots of characters coming and going, subplots upon subplots, page long sentences, and more. You have to believe that what seems at first like a bunch of disconnected vignettes (like The Wardine Section) will in fact come together; that the connections among what seem like radically disparate plot lines really do make themselves apparent in time. But at first, it requires something of a focus on the local plot lines, and a leap of faith in the fact that the global picture will eventually resolve.

Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.

6 replies on “Infinite Summer”

  2. I had to look up “wen.” I knew it was a weird growth thing, but specifically:

    (Med.) An indolent, encysted tumor of the skin; especially, a sebaceous cyst.

  4. … and if you are despairing, set your hooks in the humor of the whole thing. Herds of free-ranging hamsters? Why the video phone eventually failed? I mean, c’mon.

  5. Erik just said this to me and all the other compulsive word looker uppers:

    “if you start looking up all the words you don’t know in infinite jest, you’re going to add a few hours to each reading session. (the first time i read it, i did just that, writing definitions of all the words i didn’t know in the margins. probably did 4-5 a page before I stopped doing it about three-quarters of the way through.) there’s a reason for all the obscure word choices. you find it out later. in other words, you won’t lose anything by not understanding each and every one.”

    Pfft.

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