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There’s no objective reason that this is wrong, but still, take that shit far far away from me
Infinite Jest has extensive footnotes, which are at the back of the book. Some of them are 12 pages long and contain multiple subplots and plot points and gives history and context to how and why the Infinite Jest of the book is so deadly.
Holy shit I totally forgot about that. I’ve been meaning to reread for years now but haven’t felt ready lol. I loved it but got to the end and was like, wait, what? I thought this was going to wrap back around to the beginning. Am I too dumb for this book?
There was so many parts of that book that pop into my head randomly. I can hardly brush my teeth without thinking of Pemulis(sp?) passing out, and directly proper use of, floss after dinner at the Incandenzas (sp?). Tennis always had me thinking about it. Punts in football too. Selfie filters (the masks everyone starting having in their house for video calls.
E: oh, and nevermind infinite scroll and the basis of the plot
I think a lot about the guy who is scared aliens are trying to steal your thoughts with magnets and so they give him an MRI
The whole missile warfare game the tennis kids play was wild.
And for some reason, Hal laying on the floor imagining the amount of food he eats in a year filling the room and just being nauseous about it (I think he was also dealing with quitting the Bob Hope), really got into my head.
Man, I came across DFW when I was sitting in a very boring seminar at University of Illinois with my first smartphone in hand, enjoying the new ability to find something else to learn about while stuck there. No idea how exactly I came across it, but I read how cruise ship article and loved it. Started reading about him and was like, oh, this guy group up right here. And his parents are still here. It really caught my attention (again, boring seminar) and I was excited to read his stuff. I must have read some interviews of him or something.
Hit me hard when I learned of his suicide. Such a chilling feeling when a good communicator, like one that is able to capture parts of your inner monologue so well, through writing, speaking, of music, takes their own life.
In all honesty, in no way sarcastically, I consider this a war crime.
Clearly this is someone who actually reads their books. Given that they are mass market paperbacks… I have no problem with this. If I were an author I would much rather someone does this to my work and actually reads it and enjoys it to someone keeping a pristine copy unopened on their shelf forever.
infinite jest is half footnotes, which are at the back of the book, which is part of the “joke” of the book, being based around extreme academia.
Yeah, sure. The inane pretentiousness was just a “joke”!
Fuck that book.
I mean I know nothing about this book besides what I’ve read about it in these two comments, but it is called infinite jest, why is it so hard to believe that it’s a joke?
It’s a reference to Shakespeare, when Hamlet finds the skull of the old court jester who looked after him as a child. “Alas! poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio. A man of infinite jest and most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times…”
In the book, it’s the name of a film made by the protagonist’s late Dad, one which combines a myriad of new and experimental film techniques and technical application of lenses with some incredibly beautiful people - and is so compelling that if you watch it you can’t stop watching it until you starve to death.
The book juxtaposes the obviously bad addiction of drugs and shows us the journey of an addict trying to gain a control of their life, with a bunch of “good” addictions amongst a group of adolescent boys trying to become tennis pros at an ivy-league-type college.
With a bunch of criticism of American life: Years no longer have numbers like 1997 or 2008, they are sponsored by brands so there’s Year of the Whopper, Year of Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptical Products, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment… Canada, Mexico and the USA have formed into one giant country after the mid-west became uninhabitable due to pollution…
honestly I love the book but you have to be a certain type of person to love it.
Hmm that does sound like an interesting book, not gonna lie. But I see how the name of the book doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an elaborate meta-joke
Maybe go to a bookstore, pick up a copy, and leaf through it. I think you’ll understand exactly what I mean pretty quickly. The book is pretentious drivel.
have you tried Finnegan’s Wake instead?
Which apparently is the whole joke about this book. Maybe I should pick it up and see what this whole discussion is about lol
this is so wrong.
you’re supposed to cut them in half so you can fit each side in the pockets of your cargo shorts.
“yeah, I just finished Infinite. It was pretty good, abrupt ending though. I hear Jest picks up right where it left off.”
Skip jail. Straight to a firing squad of librarians.
Easy to spot, they’re the only firing squad with silencers
Nice
I have never been so offended by something so harmless in the greater scheme of things.
As someone who would never, ever do this to one of my beloved collection: Go for it. Watever keeps you enjoying them. As others have said, we’re not talking hundred year old first edition hardcovers here. You can still tape them up and pass them on, unlike those philistines who take one on a hike and rip out the pages they’ve read to use for campfire tinder.
last year I’ve allowed myself to do marginalia, to allow me to write notes and whatever I want on the books I read while I read. it’s inherently destructive, but it changes the whole experience. reading is no longer a passive activity but a conversation with the material. and I love it.
but felt guilty about doing irreversible changes to the book. then this shit shows up.
It’s destructive but it’s also constructive. That conversation with the material gives future owners new perspectives. At least in my opinion as someone who collects old subcultural texts. Notes in the margins adds to the experience of an old book
it’s transformative, if I’m expected to change when reading a book so is the book
I love margin notes. My friends and I have a book exchange where we read a book, write in the margins, and pass it on to the next friend. It’s nice.
Since I turned 30 I write in the margins of books I read. The better the book is the more notes. Its much more engaging.
100%
maybe it’s my ADHD, but now I cannot read without a pen
Ok, but what is there to take notes about? Assuming it’s a novel, and not some reference book.
If you have really complex books with lots of story threads, I can imagine doing this. For example in Tolstoy’s War and Peace or GRRM A song of ice and fire books.
It would be more useful to take notes besides the book rather than inside it in that case. Maybe it’s just me, though.
I like the idea of this. It would make a re-read or even just flipping through the book years later a lot of fun.
and if another person reads it, they are engaging in that conversation as well and will know what you thought of the book and add to it.
Almost all of my books are thrifted, which gives me the luxury of no guilt. And I get to argue with previous marginalia, which is fun because they can’t respond.
This is kinda how books worked throughout most of medieval history. Paper was expensive and anyway, the margins often become teaching tools in and of themselves. It becomes a centuries long comment section, so ideas get passed down and develop through the centuries. Like one of the most important books of medieval philosophy that probably no one without a doctoral in theology gives a shit about is Peter Lombard’s Sentences which is just a collection of common comments people in about books that he thought were good for teaching. (I have been working on implementing a HTML cross reference version of it using Twine, and have been trying to parse [pun intended] a theological discussion about what it means to enjoy not use god. Larger project is to recreate an accessible “medieval curriculum” through Twine)
As much as I’d fantasize about all my books preserved as a library, they’ll probably be separated from each other someday. The least I can do is put my soul in them - tuck a pamphlet or bookmark, a movie ticket. I’ve never been unhappy seeing a comment in a book - I was reading a 60 year old middle school text recently, and discovered a kid had wrote “[clearly female name] is a MAGGOT F_GGOT!!!” which was just so fucking hilarious.
Did you know that the Talmud is basically marginalia? it looks so weird because marginalia was turn into text then got another generation of marginalia
I cut mine cross-wise to save space. There is a lot of authors who make no sense.
Possibilities…
It’s a mass-produced book, and a paperback at that. You can certainly keep any such book in good condition to archive or re-read on your own terms. But that stack of acid-paper and cheap glue is going to eventually self-destruct. Unless it’s a limited production run, in danger of getting burned, autographed, is an actual collectable, or something else that makes it distinct or valuable, I say: go for it.
Source: I own a stack of these from back in the day. Despite my best efforts to store them appropriately, they’re all slowly rotting away. Some things just aren’t meant to last.
When you get right down to it, that’s true for everything. Everything self-destructs eventually. So, that seems like a strange reason to destroy it prematurely.
Of course, if it’s your book, you can do whatever you want with it. It just seems needlessly wasteful.
Well… Because it’s not wasteful at all. The point is to make it easier to read. As long as you’re not rough with it, all the pages should stay in, and then you can put both halves back on the shelf when you’re done (or just recycle it, since paper is one of the few things that’s actually recyclable). Nothing is being destroyed.
had this occur with my first copy of ninjas and superspies and ended up punching holes in it and putting it in a 3 ring binder. the binding - and slimness of the book so it had a thin spine - wasn’t meant to lay open.
This doesn’t actually save much space, which is why I cut mine in half horizontally across the pages
