I am currently reading the book and would love to hear other people’s thoughts about it. I cannot do any deep analysis of it, but here’s some random thoughts about the book:

Personally I was surprised how easy it is to read. At the same time it is hard to follow, which makes it a very slow read. Therefore I find the Infinite Jest difficult to pick up and impossible to read in long stretches. However, most of the book is very intriguing and I am determined to finish it, no matter how long it takes. Currently I’m about 100 pages in, so there’s still lot more to go.

Up to this point I enjoy the fractured structure of the book the most. It presents almost random flashes into different peoples’ lives and situations they’re in. Most of it is interesting, but I do get a bit bored reading about the stuff going on in the Tennis Academia. The constant shuffling between the text and footnotes has not gotten into me yet, but I guess it might become annoying at some point.

Other thing I love is that the universe of Infinite Jest manages to be both terrifying and ridicilous. The world presented is absolute nonsense and has both dystopian and utopian qualities:

  • There are Wheelchair Assassins, Québécois separatists and a unified American State called O.N.A.N (I am reading a translation, so the allusion to masturbation eluded me until I read about it in the internet) to begin with.

  • Calendar has been sold to sponsors so that instead of numbers and traditional names, years and months have names of their sponsor’s.

  • Teenagers are playing a game with ridicilous amount of arbitary rules, which really boils down to jumping in front of a moving train (thus bringing up new candidates for the Wheelchair Assassins).

  • So much more.

At times the whole book reads like a giant Monty Python sketch with a human element at the center of it all. Focus seems to be on themes of addiction and media influence, but who knows where it all will lead to.

I highly recommend you try the book, if you have any interest at all. To read more, you can check the Wikipedia page (seems to spoil the “plot”, so use with caution): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest

tldr; Infinite Jest is frustrating but a wonderful book/reading experience. Please share your thoughts wether you’ve read it or not.