Well, with just a little over one week left of school (and school itself basically over - exams start on Tuesday) I went out and bought myself a copy of Infinite Jest and am about to get right into it. I'll be semi-liveblogging it on here as I go along, but not at any kind of regular interval. I plan on just writing about it whenever I feel it fits. I've read a ton of DFW's other stuff (mostly his essays) so this seemed like the next logical step -- plus, seeing this is my last summer while still being in high school (grade 12 next year!!), I've got more free time to attempt to plow through this monstrosity. Although plow probably isn't the right word. Some kind of mountain climbing analogy is required here, I think.
I'm already prepared with two bookmarks and sticky notes and the emotional mindset required to allow myself to write in the margins of a book. Writing in margins, by the way, is something that I feel should probably be done more often, and I'm not sure what weird anal-retentive habit has stopped me from doing it before now. I write in the margins of plays all the time, and I've always loved annotating articles and things for English class. Books aren't so holy that writing in them would somehow damage them. It makes them more permanent, I think. The book becomes yours. Plus I'm sure it would be interesting to re read a book you wrote in years ago and see what you thought of it at the time. Reading should be a conversation, a give and take between you and the author of the book, not just a kind of passive state where the information washes over you and you hope that you somehow absorb it through literary osmosis.
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