I Love Infinite Jest

Let me tell you how I found what is still my favorite book on this planet.

It was the fall of 1996 and I was reading the first of the Star Wars novels "Heir to the Empire" and about 100 pages in and at the near zenith of my Star Wars obsession it became clear that this book was never going to not suck.

Star Wars worked because there wasn't a lot of goofy sci-fi stuff going on. It does have some, but not until you're looking at names like Z'u-ooBaa'az PriGnnt over and over in print does it really dawn on one how terrible that stuff is.

a graph for you cos it made me decide to write this post:

http://xkcd.com/483/

What this horrible Star Wars book did was two fold: it saved me from going on another Dragonlance like slog through mediocre fiction, and it got me up to the College Hill Bookstore on Thayer Street.

I saw "Infinite Jest" there. I'd read a review of it in Newsweek a year before, but all I could remember from it was there were trash catapults chucking garbage into southern Canada and it was about some film people would rather die than cease watching. What I could tell in the store was that it was gigantic.

So I bought it. It's not an easy book to get right into, especially when you're not much of a reader, so I guess a third thing I'll have to credit Tomothy Zahn's desicration of Star Wars with is giving me the ability to stomach anything that wasn't "Heir to the Empire".

Looking back, I think the only reason I kept at it other than spite was cos I had no TV. I had nothing better to do with my time. I don't remember some moment when I was like "hey, this book is AWESOME" but it obviously happened at some point.

I will now explain my belief in some kind of higher power thusly:

When I was little I'd occasionally look for four leaf clovers. Any time I actively searched I was unsucessful, despite looking at thousands at a time. The one time I found one, I knew it was there before I even looked down.