Where to start with David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again gives you the observation, comedy, footnotes, and moral unease without Infinite Jest's scale.
Infinite Jest and the culture around it both feel exhausting; you want to decide whether Wallace's attention is worth following.
Reading Infinite Jest as a difficulty to be conquered or as a club to be joined, and missing that the novel is a deeply sad book about addiction, depression, and what entertainment does to attention. Or reading it through the cult of Wallace and missing the writing itself.
Books in order
- A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again — The cruise-ship essay, the state-fair essay, the David Lynch piece. The textbook gentlest Wallace — meet his sentences and his attention before the long novel asks for three months.
- Infinite Jest — Two bookmarks — one for the main text, one for the endnotes. Read the endnotes as you go; some are short jokes, some are whole short stories, all are part of the form. Three months is a reasonable pace. The novel does not finish in any conventional sense; that is the form, not the failure. Read it for the sad parts; the sad parts are the heart.
Further reading
- Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — The short story collection between Infinite Jest and the late work. Not in this catalog yet.
- Consider the Lobster — The second essay collection. Often paired with A Supposedly Fun Thing as the canonical entry. Not in this catalog yet.
- The Pale King — The unfinished posthumous novel. Save it; it is the deep-end book the rest of the corpus was pointing toward.