6 ms·
Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he
by npilk 4y ago
Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)
- adam_ellsworth 4y agoThe link you provided didn't work for me. I was able to find another copy here: https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace.pdf https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace...
- boldslogan 4y agoSpoiler: don’t read this unless spoiled But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the child was the funniest chapter of a book I’ve ever read. And I recommend this book based only on this one chapter. I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe something like it’s always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama comes slightly close. But I’ve never laughed out loud from a book like that.
- nelsondev 4y agoAs for comedy in books, I find Bukowski - Post Office to be quite hilarious at times.
- havblue 4y agoI liked the David Foster Wallace reader to start with. It was basically a greatest hits of his best material including a decent chunk of Infinite Jest.
- rintakumpu 4y agoThe first time I read Infinite Jest I was expecting something as inaccessible as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow but ended up finding the book pretty readable and a total delight. And but so I would highly recommend it, just take the off-beat sci-fi setting at face value and skip the footnotes if you feel like you want to focus on the story. You can always return to those later.
- boucher 4y agoI cannot imagine reading this book and skipping the footnotes.
- iggldiggl 4y agoYou just need a second bookmark, and then you're good to go…
- boucher 4y agoYeah, or read it on a Kindle like I did and the jumping is pretty easy.
- jbmny 4y agoI've been roughly halfway through the book for years, so take this for what it's worth, but if they were actually footnotes I might have read them. Instead they are endnotes, meaning you have to pick up a solid pound of book and flip to the end each time you encounter one. And there are many. I just found that dehumanizing. Lol
- JonathanMerklin 4y agoThe endnotes are fundamental to the experience. There are some key plot points divulged or hinted at there first (and sometimes there exclusively, IIRC). Pemulis' funniest moments are back there. I still find my mind drifting to the description of Cage III: Free Show from J.O.I.'s filmography from time to time. If nothing else, I once read a comment somewhere online that noted that the constant back-and-forth from text to endnotes and back is physically analogous to a back-and-forth in a tennis match. If thematic consistency in the third dimension was actually something DFW was going for, it's a shame you're only seeing half of the court.
- numlocked 4y agoDFW said somewhere (I can't recall where) that he wanted the reader to have the physical experience of moving back and forth, and that the process of moving and flipping sort of echoed the jumping between the years of the chapters and story. Or something :) I found it annoying initially, but after I read that (when I was maybe 1/3 through), I did come to appreciate it a bit more. Maybe I'm just impressionable.
- iggldiggl 4y agoI first stumbled across the Pale King in my local library, and it was indeed enough to get me hooked and read first one of the collected essay books and then Infinite Jest.
- xefer 4y ago...
- hammock 4y agoNot to mention the pulleys and joists reasonably belong to the flagpole, not the flag or the rope (not to mention the rope doesn't belong to the flag, either)
- mistersquid 4y agoDFW's early short story "Forever Overhead" gives a sense of his potential and lyricism. [0] It's one of my favorites. [0] http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readings/forever%20overhead.pdf http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readi...
- cantSpellSober 4y agoAnd if you've read The Pale King, you can skip Something To Do With Paying Attention. The content is mostly the same, seems like the release of the latter was a cash grab.