Rating: 
Summary: The Best Book I Have Ever Read
Review: Absolutely the best book ever. I have even considered buying a bible cover for it.
DFW's other stuff is good too, especially 'a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again'
yeah.
Rating: 
Summary: Book... Good.
Review: This was a pretty good book. An interesting question is what it is, really. Find out what that question is in just about every review you read about it, but the only way you can answer it is if you read this book. Wallace will give you some interesting perspectives on the nature of happiness. Try it out if you like a different approach on prose and are up for reading something different.
Rating:
Summary: infinitely enjoyable
Review: From the halfway house to the weelchair assasins to the enfield tennis academy, where marijuana is a way of life, "Infinite Jest" does nothing but satisfy. A commentary on the sad state of american society and politics, "infinite jest" hits the mark, on all levels. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: To Dazzle and Dizzy
Review: Wallace's language (voice) is breath-taking, awe-inspiring, and wrenchingly self-conscious. I am impressed, and cannot help but think that that was Wallace's intention all along. The book is a whir of dizzying perspectives, exotic vocabulary and, well, gargantuan (a trophy for coffeetables around the globe). Certainly worth reading, and telling everyone within a fifty-mile radius that you've done so. At the end, though, this massive novel does not succeed in forming a new perspective within the reader, an outlook that the reader carries with her/him after the back cover is slammed shut. That said, when the ugly demon of self-consciousness does not raise his pointed head within this novel, the writing is extraordinary and, in places, profound. If only the sparse profundity could have been amplified and distended, this could very well have been one of the greatest novels in American literature.
Rating:
Summary: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Review: Yes, that is the title of Dave Eggers' new novel...but it so accurately describes this opus by David Foster Wallace. This is the sort of novel authors build a career on...and this is destined to be a classic of modern (or hyper-modern) fiction. Make of that hyperbole what you will. But Wallace has taken a series of intricately detailed plots (and there are several plots going here)and sub-plots and situated them in an often surreal, not-too-distant American future...aliented and bored; an America that takes itself way too seriously. Out of these, Wallace conjures up a series of themes touching on media, entertainment, terrorism, disfunctionality, and addiction. While this makes for some difficult reading at times, what with flipping for footnotes, trying to figure out dates (the naming rights for years have been marketed to corporations), and keeping track of characters and clues...it's nonetheless masterful that Wallace still tells a number of compelling stories. The major plot lines revolve around a tennis academy, an adjoining half way house for the addicted, and the use by a Quebec nationalist group of a terrorist weapon, a video cassette known as the Entertainment: a mysterious film that acts as a narcotic on those who watch it...in effect, leaving its victims in a catatonic state. The Entertainment is an obvious metaphor of the narcotizing effect of modern media. Wallace could have easily left Infinite Jest as a mere science fiction parable on modern media. Fortunately, he didn't. Sometimes the lines created by the many sub-plots and themes in Infinite Jest cross. Often they don't. In either event, these threads more often than not leave behind a series of questions that Wallace often leaves dangling (or does he? Perhaps the answers are in the footnotes!). But the unanswered questions and unresolved issues are often as telling about Wallace's intentions than those few instances where the reader is spoon fed the answer. It's a lot of work to go into a lot of detail about a novel this big and complicated. If you didn't like "Gravity's Rainbow" or "Women and Men" or "The Recognitions"....you probably won't like this anyway. But if you have a soft spot for big, crooked novels like this....it will drag you in. And ultimately, what drags you into "Infinite Jest" is the author's empathy for some of his characters. It's expressed throughout this novel as sadness....this novel is indeed heartbreaking in it's description of those desperates in 12-step programs, the degradation caused by addiction, the sick disfunctionality of modern family life. Perhaps what's saddest is Wallace's dark view on where we're headed. Even those moments of hilarity in this book, and there are many, are tinged with a sadness that makes any humor that much more bittersweet,even though the reader is laughing out loud...maybe what makes these particularly poignant, is that perhaps we're laughing at the hopelessness of the all-encompassing blues that has pervaded Wallace's fictional society. In Wallace's world, sometimes that's the only possible response. If not the only one.
Rating: 
Summary: Either brilliant-but-baffling, or baffling-yet-brilliant
Review: "Infinite Jest" is a book that is difficult to describe. The three loosely intertwined plot threads involve an academy for teenage tennis prodigies, a halfway house for hard core drug addicts, and a political farce where a lounge singer becomes President and really cheeses off Canada. The narrative jumps around a lot, partly in time and often between different characters' viewpoints. The book meanders from the rituals of tennis drills to the harrowing binge stories of addicts to the brutal tactics of a group of wheelchair-bound Quebec separatists. It is engrossing but not casual reading. (It is also probably the best advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous I can imagine, as the damaged addicts are irritated by the cheesy cliches that are heaped upon them, but after sticking with it and taking it One Day At Time they eventually are shocked to find that they no longer crave their Substance on a daily basis. Powerful stuff.) The size of the book is daunting but after the first couple of hundred pages the fix kicked in and I was hooked. Also notable is the hundred pages of footnotes in the back of the book, which I found annoying. Maybe Mr. Wallace is getting kickbacks from the bookmark industry, I don't know. In an interview from Wisconsin Public Radio he says that "one of the neat things about having a footnote is it's a way to get kind of a double consciousness, or a sort of call-and-response on the page", and he does occasionally use the notes to comment on the text as if the narrator at that point in the book and the writer of the endnotes were different people. For me, though, it was a case of the format of the text distracting from the substance of the text. It's hard to say if I could describe "Infinite Jest" as accessible. Some sections of the book are very funny or informative or moving; other chapters just seemed full of unnecessary detail. The detail builds up vivid pictures of the main characters and their existential crises, though, that really hit home with me after a while. At one point when a character cried, I cried too. One part of my fascination with the book comes from my emotional investment in the people trying to deal with their hard core addictions. More of my fascination is with the book's self-referencing internal structure that is just begging to be analyzed and argued about. It's PhD-thesis fuel, this book. The complexity is engrossing and humbling and confusing all at once. I love it that Mr. Wallace brought his considerable knowledge and skill to bear in his masterpiece here, but it was also clearly his intent to make a book that was captivating but not satisfying in a conventional way, leaving a lot of open questions and a need to re-read the book to be able to piece some things together. How many "post"s do you have to put in front of "modern" to describe such a mind-bender of a novel? Although "Infinite Jest" is meaty and thought-provoking and well worth reading, I was disappointed that something which takes such an effort to chew through didn't have an easily digestible payoff at the end.¹ I have a hundred other things I would like to say about the book, but I'll just stop here after gushing-with-reservations. If you've got the time and gumption for it, do yourself a favor and read it. ¹ I suppose I am an example of one of the themes of the book, which is that Americans crave easy entertainment to an extreme degree.
Rating:
Summary: !
Review: i know its long, just read it. its worth it. by the end you will have developed such strong relationships to the charecters that you will be sad that it is finally over. you will read it again.
Rating:
Summary: Start at Page 198...
Review: When I began this amazingly good book I hated it completly and thoroughly. I felt like the book was sent over an instant messager from Wallace to his editor, who would promptly send the paragraph to be published without reading it. I thought Wallace was a talanted, but pomposu ..., too full of himself to show any restraint in his own writing. Once I got to page 198 though, I was hooked.
I feel like if you just read from 198 to like 211 this section will really hook you and then you can start at the beginning. The book's major failing is that it is like a good, no a great, album with a poor song order. If a few sections were just switched around a little, the book would be a little easier to read. All the good things people say about this book though are true. It's complexly brilliant, surprisingly readable, hilarious and sad at the same time.
Get addicted to this book.
Rating: 
Summary: I guess I am not that smart....
Review: I tried, I really did! I am your average 30 year old who likes to think that they enjoy a range of novels from Harry Potter to Oprah's club to Bridget Jones type tales to David Sedaris...my favorite book (I Know this Much is True by Wally Lamb) was even this long! I barely made it through 150 pages of Infinite Jest...there is just too much to figure out! I didn't like so many characters (I would have just liked to hear about the one family), and I think that you need to be doctoral student in literature to unravel all of the language. I am not one to give up on books (I read The Corrections!) but I was starting to dread my nightly reading times thinking about returning to this maze of a book! No offense to the author's triumph...I guess I am not that smart!
Rating:
Summary: The Newest Testament
Review: Infinite Jest (IJ) has, understandably, received an awful lot of press and reviews ever since its appearance almost six years ago. Since there have been many excellent reviews of this book of biblical proportions, I would like to focus shortly on points that are especially relevant for prospective readers. IJ is a decidedly post-modern opus and it is advisable that prospective readers have some familiarity with the genre. If not, I would advise an introductory/lighter encounter with books by Stephenson and Danielewsky.
IJ is a compulsive book about compulsion/addiction produced by a compulsive writer for a compulsive readership. While this final "post-editor" version offers the readership only 60-70% of the original manuscript, the text and footnotes together bring IJ in the Himaleic "War and Peace" category. While reading IJ did not pose the challenge that I encountered in books like The Brothers Karamazov, The Recognitions and Gravity's Rainbow, it's intentionally fractured narrative posed its own set of difficulties. Yet, once used to this, and beyond the list of years of subsidized time given on page 223, things fell in place more easily. Focusing on two characters, the one living on top of the hill in a tennis academy, the other at the bottom in an alcohol/drug recovery center, the book offers an almost encyclopedic study of addiction/compulsion. From this "main-structure" of the narrative the author ventures into an endless number of side themes that vary from relevant to highly tangential. In addition, the content of the sections varies from deeply philosophical to screw ball comedy, from superior concentration to "empty set content", while the style is also all over the place. I think IJ deserves a place among the modern classics. It is a highly individual expression that extends the achievements of books like The Recognitions and Gravity's Rainbow in new directions. In addition, and maybe more importantly, it is a book with an awful lot of heart. About twenty years ago I saw a theater production of Tchekov's "Three Sister's" that had Dusty Springfield's rendition of Bacharach's "Anyone Who Has a Heart" continuously on the background. This would also be an appropriate theme song for this book, because through and often in despite of it all Wallace is a voice of compassion. ...While it helps to have some Heidegger and Sartre under the belt before climbing the IJ mountain, it is really not that difficult to figure out why this book is concluded in this manner. A truly classical ending. IJ is a great, close to mandatory, book. It is not an easy read: both the fractured narrative, and the footnotes that intentionally disrupt the reading often, put you in the shoes of the AA meeting attendees to later draw the conclusion that "the method" works. Both Hal and Don will become good friends and help you through. What a beautiful book!
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