I should confess that I’ve read a lot of David Foster Wallace, but I’ve never completed the gargantuan “Infinite Jest,” his quote unquote magnum opus and legitimate shot at the Great American Novel. I’ve read nearly all his interviews, short stories and his first novel “Broom of the System.” I’ve even read books by authors he recommended in those interviews, like Cormac McCarthy and David Markson. But I never made it past page 200 in 1998, the year I first dug into the 1,079-page beast of a book. I followed the wallace-l list and read about other people reading IJ. I learned things about postmodernism and French philosophers and a new Canadian band called Godspeed You Black Emperor that several people on wallace-l back then said was the perfect soundtrack for reading IJ. I’d loved what I’d read up through the first fifth of the book but somewhere around Madame Psychosis’s trudge through a dreary, rain-soaked Boston in pursuit of her last fix and the “black rainbows” I’ll always remember from those cars wipers, I got distracted. I put the book down and never managed to pick it back up. I continued to eagerly read his short stories in Harpers and the like but I never returned to IJ and its dreamy blue sky cover and the like serious commitment it required.

And but so when I learned of Infinite Summer a few weeks ago, I knew this was the time to return. It’s a communal reading project that could only have happened in the interconnected world circa now and “only” requires about 10 pages of reading a day, which puts the end at September 22—eleven days and one year after DFW’s passing last year. I still have to figure out what otiose means. There’s something very cool and enjoyable and world community-feeling about seeing impressions from readers on blogs and twitters (hash tag = #infsum) in sync with your own running experience of the novel. So, even though I’ve got other stuff to read (such as a kindly lent-to-me copy of Alex Ross’s excellent survey of 21st century music and Martin Stopford’s newest edition of Maritime Economics), this is taking priority for now. It’s certainly helping me hone my powers of concentration, a very Wallacian concern in this crazy ADHD world we live in. Also, there is a strong case to be made that 2009 is in fact the book’s primary year in the “near future” of IJ, which makes it even more fitting to read a speculative work about the future in that actual future—something like reading 1984 in 1984.

Stumble it!