How to read Infinite Jest
Here is how you read Infinite Jest. Feel the weight in your hand. Stare at the blue-sky-with-white-clouds cover. Get used to the shape and size in your bag.
This is where you put your two bookmarks. This is how you flip pages back and forth. Practice stopping at the end of sentences to go and read the endnotes. Practice putting bookmark A back in place for the longer footnotes so that you make sure you follow through and read them.
This is how you convince yourself the endnotes are important. Some of them are painful, but some of them make you laugh. All of them are important, later.
Learn to pick it up when you don’t feel like picking it up. Learn to have enough time to read the multiple pages of words without even paragraph breaks so that you don’t get interrupted and resent the book or its author.
Here is how to explain to others what you’re reading and why it’s so big. Most people will give you a strange look, which will be duplicated on your own face once they ask you what it’s about.
Here is how to be ok when others give up and stop reading. And how to be ok when you decide to stop reading too.
Learn to ignore when people tell you it will get better at page X. It will not. It will stay the way it is. You either push on or you don’t. Learn to be ok with your decision and not be ashamed. It’s only a book.
This is how to feel comfortable w/r/t using the terms you read in other situations. This is how you care and not care at the same time. How you make it to The Show.
These are the coffee stains, the dog-earred pages, the broken spine of your success.
Here is what it looks like to try and read before going to bed only to feel your eyes drooping and you gratefully put your bookmark back in place. Find the time, but don’t torture yourself with finding the time.
This is how you accept the words you do not know. Either look them up or gleen their meaning from context. If you are unable, don’t fret too much. Try to relax about “getting it.” Remember it’s just a book.
Notice the brief, hidden insights to characters contained within volumes of insight in tennis/addiction/what have you. Even though none of it is important, all of it is important.
This is how to get through yrstruly: Read it aloud to yourself. Have the patience to understand that not everyone sounds like you or talks like you or is as smart as you.
This is how to recover when addiction becomes sickeningly real to you and you are emotionally rocked by passages. Remind yourself it is fiction while also accepting it is more true than you will (hopefully) ever know.
Here is how to fall in love with a dead man through the only thing of his you have ever read. There is a finite amount of work left to read. Cherish what is there. Remember to laugh because he made it funny on purpose. Read through the devastation without speculating about his personal life.
This is how to keep going.
