Infinite Zombies

Infinite Summer has wrapped up, and I am still reading Infinite Jest. In fact, I’m only about halfway through (currently on page 550, by rough estimate [1]). But I’m still counting it as a victory, because Infinite Jest had been on my list for a long time, and I’m now too far in to back out. It’ll take a while to finish it up, but my first experiment with an internet-based reading project has been a very positive experience. I’ve met some cool people, learned a lot about DFW, and made my way half-way through a crazy, thought-provoking novel.

I’ll blog more observations about the novel as I make my way through it, though I’m more concerned, now, with simply reading it.

Meanwhile, Infinite Summer has launched a follow-up reading project focusing on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Coincidentally, I have been reading that novel along with Infinite Jest. It is one of the novels that comes with Classics app, and I found myself reading when I didn’t have my copy of Infinite Jest around, both because I like vampire stories (in film, at least) and because I’d never read it before and felt a little guilty about it. So I could jump on that bandwagon, but I’ll probably just eschew the deadlines and continue to read them both at my own pace. Dracula is light fare compared to Infinite Jest, and can be a nice respite from it, at least when Stoker’s occasionally ham-fisted prose and tin ear for dialect doesn’t get in the way of his storytelling.

Being as I’m still in the thick of it, I can’t offer a resounding pronouncement on the novel itself. All I can say is that I continue to enjoy it. And I’ve enjoyed chatting with you about it.

Notes:

1. I found lugging the book around was an impediment to my actually reading it, so I bought the Kindle version for my iPod touch. The Kindle app doesn’t give you page numbers, it gives you a “location” value which is, for reasons I still can’t determine, expressed as a range (I am, currently, at “Location 12515-12523”). Triangulating with the paper copy, I found that multiplying that first number by 0.044 makes for a pretty accurate estimate of the page number in my paperback copy.

[This post was dual-published at Infinite Zombies and at wheatblog.com.]