Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

And by this, I mean this. I’ll be joining a bunch of strangers in reading David Foster Wallace’s tome Infinite Jest over the course of the summer.

When I was a Boy Scout, I learned a few things about leadership. One of those things is the importance of accountability. I posted that last Classic DD&U to remind you, my precious reader, that I have once before embarked on a long and arduous literary journey. Here’s a progress report.

Pathetic

That’s 67 pages worth of Swann’s Way in like, two years. Not good.

But that leads me to another thing I learned in the Scouts: goals should be both measurable and attainable. Now, I would never say that reading all of Remembrance is unattainable, but how do you measure it? By definition, I haven’t failed yet: I’ve got the rest of my life to finish this thing. So maybe someday, I will.

The charm of Infinite Summer is that it sets a measurable and attainable goal. Seventy-five pages a week? Easy! And there’s a built-in support structure. I’ve already read 25 pages in a day and a half. And by the end of the summer, I’ll have read one of those books that everyone says you should read, but you would probably never do outside of a class or a book club with thousands of members.

Then again, the thing is like, a thousand pages, so feel free to take everything I just said with the requisite grain of salt.

Should've worn a V-neck

Tags: goals, Infinite Jest, Infinite Summer, Proust

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Reading and Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.