Now that it's almost March, I've decided it's time to start on my reading project for the year – which is to read all of the books my terrific friends gave me for my 45th birthday party back in September.  I've never had reading goals (except those Read-a-thon things in elementary school) and just read whatever catches my eye from my Infinite Pile of Books.  Sometimes I borrow from Brad's pile.  I also like to re-read books I love or read so long ago that I'm starting to forget them.  This seems to happen at an alarmingly increasing rate – the forgetting part – and I find that I see things differently each time.

I was the fortunate recipient of a plethora of books that each friend chose for me because the book was significant to them, and I think that it would be good to read those books and review them.  I didn't manage to get thank you notes written for these gifts (surprise, surprise), so this is also a way of saying how thankful I am for my friends, for books and authors, for the freedom to read whatever I want.

The first book I've grabbed from the pile is The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, given to me by David Cohen.  I did already read Jil Cohen's gift book back in September, which was You Don't Know Sh*t, which I enjoyed so much I gave a copy to another scatological trivia-loving friend.  

Thank you, David, for the thoughtful and surely thought provoking birthday gift - 

I may have finally found the electronic device that will change my book acquiring behavior.  For my May 1st Life Dinner gift Brad gave me a Sony Portable Reader, and then set it up for me this weekend (which may be the nicest part of the gift).  He tried it first, which is always a good idea since I’m much less excited about new technologies than he is.

But this one has been great.  The screen is easy on the eyes, and it feels like a book in the hand, and has an extremely easy user interface and easy downloading from the online bookstore.  I read The Road over the weekend for my first book.  The only strange thing is that I keep reaching to turn the page instead of pressing the Next Page > key.  I’ll learn a new behavior eventually..

I’m on an airplane from Miami to Denver, surrounded by sleeping Asian people, next to Brad (sleeping, too, of course).  I hardly ever bring out my computer on an airplane since it’s a 21st century kind of mercy to have a space/time where the demand to be connected can be ignored without guilt (at least until the airlines get EVDO going everywhere); but I just finished reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and I wanted to write while it was still fresh in me how much I loved this book.  I went back to the beginning after I read about 100 pages to slow down as much as possible and savor the first time I read this book.  It’s a good one to read in one big breath.  I’m certain there will be many other readings.  This one goes straight to the top of my Best Books Read in 2006 List.  Number One with a bullet.

This book left me with that particular sorrowful feeling of recognizing beauty and the temporary nature of all things simultaneously.  There’s probably a German word for it (Gotterdammerung? Weltschmertz?).  It comes along with the physical symptoms of true aesthetic pleasure, which I mostly experience while listening to music, but also sometimes feel when looking at art or being in nature and watching the sunrise or sunset — or reading a beautiful book; the goose bumps on the arms and the hairs raised on the back of the neck and tears in the eyes and an opening somewhere near the heart.  Maybe it’s caused by a vibration from the music or the breath or something.  I don’t really know, but it’s the part that recognizes art.  This book creates that experience in abundance.

Ms. Krauss writes about loss and recovery from loss, missing/absent parents (both through death and emotional absence), and the Jewish heritage of the Holocaust.  She and Jonathan Safran Foer (who wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, my #1 Book of 2005) are married.  Comparisons between their work are probably inevitable, and there are similarities.  Both have a gift for expressing the inner lives of children and young adults, and deal with similar themes.  And both are beautiful writers.

This book is dedicated to Ms. Krauss’ husband, and to her grandparents, with what looks like their passport photos on the dedication page, with the inscription “for my grandparents, who taught me the opposite of disappearing.”  One of the major themes of the book is about disappearance and denying.  There is a hilarious and sad passage on page 36 between Alma Singer and her brother, Bird.

WHAT I AM NOT

My brother and I used to play a game.  I’d point to a chair.  “THIS IS NOT A CHAIR,” I’d say.  Bird would point to the table.  “THIS IS NOT A TABLE.”  “THIS IS NOT A WALL,” I’d say.  “THAT IS NOT A CEILING.”  We’d go on like that.  “IT IS NOT RAINING OUT.”  “MY SHOE IS NOT UNTIED!” Bird would yell.  I’d point to my elbow.  “THIS IS NOT A SCRAPE.”  Bird would lift his knee.  “THIS IS ALSO NOT A SCRAPE!”  “THAT IS NOT A KETTLE!” “NOT A CUP!”  “NOT A SPOON!”  “NOT DIRTY DISHES!”  We denied whole rooms, years, weathers.  Once, at the peak of our shouting, Bird took a deep breath.  At the top of his lungs he shrieked:  “I!  HAVE NOT!  BEEN!  UNHAPPY!  MY WHOLE LIFE!”  “But you’re only seven,” I said.

Passages like this remind me of the deep and real sadnesses of childhood, and how much I really like being an adult.  And how much I love beautiful writing.  Put this one in your To Read pile if you  haven’t read it already.

I knew that whatever book I read after Infinite Jest was going to seem sparse in comparison, so I just pulled a random book from the To Read shelves and ended up with a first novel, The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst.  I’m enjoying books that don’t set everything up for the reader, and this one leaves some nice room to figure things out on your own.  The central mystery is whether the narrator’s wife fell to her death accidentally or committed suicide.  The writing is clear and fluid and the characters reveal themselves gradually.  The narrator’s voice changes as he moves through his grief and brings you along with him.  It’s very nicely done —

Whew! I’m finished reading Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace is a genius. Definitely. Absolutely. No doubt about it.

Don’t read further if you’re thinking of reading this book, because I’m revealing all kinds of goodies in here.

I stayed up late Saturday night / Sunday morning (at 2 a.m. it’s dark outside, even here at the 59th parallel) and mowed through a healthy chunk (up to page 809) which made it possible to imagine that the end was in sight. I finished Sunday night. This is a long book. And difficult. It should have a Tipper-Gore-style sticker on the front saying, (in addition to Adult Lyrics) —  Warning:  Reader is required to pay close attention throughout and to keep a dictionary handy at all times. There were other things that were difficult for me. There were stretches in the middle where I was just kind of slogging through, slowly, carefully, dictionary in hand. It does pick up momentum rapidly toward the end and he starts to weave some narrative threads together, which brings me to another difficulty — I’m not enough of a post-modern lit crit hysterical realism theorist to be beyond all narrative conventions. I kept expecting convergence, but the narrative lines are asymptotic. I kept going back and re-reading to see if I had missed some important moment that explains what happens to Hal, but I don’t see it. I don’t mind being left in the middle of a narrative — I’m left with Gately in a hospital bed, and don’t really "know" what happens to him (or any of the other characters either), but I liked Hal and wanted to know what happend to turn him into a freakazoid in the opening pages of the book. I also hereby publicly confess that I skimmed through an ugly section about a drug addict killing cats and dogs (pps. 538-547) and another ugly part that described in detail a movie showing a homosexual rape where the victim secretly had AIDS, and maybe a couple of other ugly things too bleak and graphic for my delicate sensibilities. He definitely has a flair for the grotesque.

I think my real criticism is somewhere in the neighborhood of admiring the intellectual firewords (meant to type "fireworks," but I’m getting into the neologism thing), which are brilliant — but thinking that the light doesn’t give off a lot of emotional heat. Reviewers (which I spent a couple of hours reading) compare his work to those of Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen and other cranky and hilarious writers in my generation whose work I admire/enjoy/love. I think Infinite Jest gives less for a reader to hold on to emotionally than these writers. It doesn’t connect to things outside its own world. It wasn’t particularly thought provoking/inspiring for me, especially compared to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, where I paused often to consider and ponder and think and reflect for long moments on humanity and history.

Which may be at least part of what he’s saying: the anomie of our generation — whose earliest memories include Watergate and helicopters lifting from embassy roofs in Saigon and Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army and stagflation and a whole plethora of institutions falling down.

And on a lighter note, for those of us who really did spend time reading the dictionary as children, the Vocabulary Development section:

Here’s a list of words I didn’t know before and managed to look up. There are other medical and pharmacological terms that I understood from context and didn’t feel compelled to look up, and I can only imagine that I missed a few others scattered about here and there, but these are some juicy ones:

• anfractuous (p. 39)
• fulvous (p. 93)
• strabismic (p. 290)
• saurian (forgot to track the page number)
• ephebe (p. 292)
• extant (p. 101)
• papular (p. 200)
• sallet (p. 527)
• caparison (p. 533)
• carminative (p. 630)
• apical (p. 290) N.B. definition 2
• Actaeon (p. 290)
• parturient (p. 789)
• antinomically (p. 792)
• strigil (p. 832)
• effulgence (p. 854)
• inspissated (p. 1078)
• sinciput (p. 950)
• felo-de-se (p. 1048) (hyphenated in the dictionary entry, but not in the text)
• nystagmus (p. 1018)
• Eschaton (found everywhere)
• parget (p. 666)
• pules (p. 670)
• ablative (p. 470) (ablation)

And an entirely new category of words not found in dictionary.com:

• pedalferrous (p. 93)
• ascapartic (p. 290)
• semion (p. 101) which I’m going to relate to semiotics since it’s about making a sign
• spansules (p. 1078, footnote 368)
• fremitic (p. 353) [frenetic?]
• omnissent (p. 599) [omniscient]?
• lalating (p. 788) [ululating?]
• votaried (p. 434) [votaries does exist]

I went to Google, typed in ascapartic and found a blog post of other words from Infinite Jest that are exciting and new and imaginary. He also uses ‘mobiusizing," thereby making a noun into a verb. I have a college friend who did her PhD work on this syntactical magic which I can’t remember the name for right now. Examples: fax, FedEx, office, and many others from the world of technology, but also the New England-y verb "to summer."

In this whole huge book the only thing that stood out in my mind as a possible error was a description of a scream on a B#.  B# is almost always called C natural and I didn’t think B# really existed as a notation.  But I’ve been trolling around on wikipedia, brushing up my music theory, and B# exists as the final and 7th sharp in the key of C# major.  Have I mentioned yet that David Foster Wallace is a genius?

I’m sure I have lots more (prolix, verbose, bombastic, circumlocutory, diffuse, flowery, fustian, gabby, garrulous, grandiloquent, involved, long-winded, loquacious, magniloquent, palaverous, periphrastic, pleonastic, prolix, redundant, prolix, repeating, repetitious, repetitive, rhetorical, talkative, talky, tautological, tautologous, tedious, tortuous) things to say about Infinite Jest — but I’ll save something for tomorrow.

Prolix:  tediously prolonged; wordy, or tending to speak or write at excessive length. Antonym: concise. 

I’m on page 198 of Infinite Jest, and while I’m thoroughly enjoying myself, I must say that David Foster Wallace asks a lot of a reader.  You actually must pay attention, read slowly, and use all of your vocabulary — and then some.  I’ve used www.dictionary.com to look up palaver and apotheosizing and, ironically, prolix.  I’m not finding it to be excessively wordy or tedious; it’s highly amusing and he has a real knack for capturing different voices and small moments that feel genuine — but he does use a LOT of words.  David Foster Wallace is the anti-Hemingway.  Antonym:  concise.

Here’s his description of an FM radio show on M.I.T.’s station,  "WYYY 109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band." [Although I want to ask some radio geek whether the FM broadcast band really goes all the way up to 109?]

Albeit literally sophomoric, "Those Were the Legends…" is a useful drama-therapy-type catharsis-op — M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars:  nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist’s kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground — and the show pulls down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that’s due to reverse-inertia, a Newton’s-II-like backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F 0000h.-0100h., which it precedes. (p. 182)

And a juicy tidbit from the almost 100 pages of end notes:

57. Ingesters’ accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis doesn’t completely get but can at least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one monograph’s toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who’d ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes. (p. 996)

And a small jewel of a sentence: "He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see."  (p. 23)

And let’s not forget the herds of feral hamsters rampaging through the desert outside of Tucson (p. 93, and likely more to come since I’m only on page 198).  This struck a personal chord with me because one of my numerous and varied types of childhood rodents was a mouse named Farrell; named both as a play on "feral" and as an homage to Suzanne Farrell, prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet and Balanchine muse.  I like lemmings and capybara and pika and appreciate a writer who has the good sense to include hamsters in his sometime-in-the-alarmingly-near-future world.

Some of the things that other people say about Infinite Jest and one of his other books, Oblivion, and what he says himself corroborates my sense that he’s asking readers to dig deep and engage, and I’m happy to do so.  I’m going to keep reading along — only 800 more pages to go..