Last semester, I taught a Non-Fiction and Its Process course. Instead of filling the syllabus with a smorgasbord of authors, I assigned the one book of non-fiction I knew well: David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Much to my surprise, the students dug it.
In fact, they dug it so much that a group of them were at least interested in reading Infinite Jest, DFW’s mammoth novel that clocks in at just over a thousand pages. I decided to strike while the iron was hot and wrote a schedule to get through the book over break, set up a Facebook page for an online reading group discussion, and started plugging away.
When the dust settled, six people started the book, two of us actually finished it, and I had learned some important lessons. Here are five of them…
- It’s better with a schedule. When I initially set up the schedule, I had us finishing the book in five weeks. The impatient part of me started poking me in the side and saying things like, “We can do that at least two weeks faster, right?” Fortunately, I did not listen to that voice. Early on, I was finishing up the week’s reading a day or two before the schedule’s demand. As a result I didn’t burn myself out which is important since the first 350 pages or so of the book are much harder slogging than the rest. Once I hit the middle of the book, I couldn’t put it down. My habit of reading for 45-60 minutes a day served me well and kept my stamina up for the best part of the book. If I’m tackling a big book like this again in the future, I’ll be plotting out my schedule.
- It’s better with official audio. The last time I went through the book, I listened to it via a text to speech program called Panopreter. This time through, I had the official audiobook read by Sean Pratt. There was a WORLD of difference. Pratt is a professional, and he brought the thunder for over fifty hours PLUS all the book’s endnotes (yeah, the book has over a hundred pages of endnotes). My reading experience was improved considerably by having Pratt’s emotive reading in my ears as my eyes scanned Wallace’s dense pages.
- It’s better with compatriots. After the first week, it became clear that only one student was really going to try and finish the novel, but knowing that student was on board kept me going, at least in my dedication to posting weekly questions and trying to keep the “teaching” part of my head engaged while I read. Coming up with the questions each week (and then trying to answer them for myself) was a great way to review the week’s reading and engage with it a little more rigorously. I wouldn’t have written the questions if I was simply reading it on my own. More than that, my student recognized things that I didn’t, so it was important for me to see that my reading wasn’t the only possible interpretation. When I tackle my next big book, it will be with at least one other person.
- It’s better with the metaphor in your mind that the novel is a piece of music, not a movie. The suggestion comes from Zadie Smith who insists that the movie metaphor for a book makes the reader too passive. Instead, we should imagine that the book is a piece of music that we’ve been asked to play. The genius of the piece of music will be more apparent when we have to exercise our own genius to bring it to life. There were about four hundred pages in the middle of this book where I was totally riffing on Wallace while the other six hundred plus pages were adventures in first-time sight reading. When I come to the novel with the expectation that I’m going to have actively bring out its beauty, it changes how I read.
- It’s better with a focus on discipleship. I was never so absorbed by the plot that I didn’t notice what the entire reading experience was like, and I was never so cowed by DFW’s stylistic and thematic complexity that I forgot I was essentially helping students navigate their way through the book too. As a result, I took away lessons from the book that are totally applicable to discipleship: insights about community, textual engagement, and active reading. It made me think about the way I read the Bible each day and helped me get started on finally working through Calvin’s Institutes.
None of these lessons involve the novel’s content per se because I’m saving those insights for an essay I’m writing on the book and Hamlet. Suffice it so say that was a top 10 reading experience for me, and one that I’ll be reflecting on for more than what it taught me about the book’s themes.