Ben’s Reviews > Infinite Jest > Status Update
Ben
is on page 87 of 1088
I'm trying to give this a few hundred pages to at least interest me. I enjoy the massive vocabulary, but I'm getting very little in the way of entertainment value. I have a sneaking suspicion that this book is essentially Scrotie McBooger Balls from South Park. It's complete nonsense that makes critics feel inferior, so they create meaning and brilliance out of nothing to feel superior.
— Aug 26, 2023 04:06AM
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Ben’s Previous Updates
Ben
is on page 615 of 1088
While the vocab and sentence structure have mostly normalized, the pages are still huge with tiny little font. I've got full ideas of the different stories going on, but I'm still trying to guess if and how they'll come together.
— Oct 12, 2023 03:46AM
Ben
is on page 254 of 1088
I've gotten the hang of his extremely long sentences, lack of transitions from character to character, temporal jumps back and forth, etc.
I've now found some real humor here, some of his more subtle humor is coming through, and there is a somewhat disjointed narrative building. The workman's comp write up made me laugh to tears and the section on "videophony" was hilarious and terrifyingly omniscient for 1996.
— Sep 09, 2023 08:01AM
I've now found some real humor here, some of his more subtle humor is coming through, and there is a somewhat disjointed narrative building. The workman's comp write up made me laugh to tears and the section on "videophony" was hilarious and terrifyingly omniscient for 1996.
Ben
is on page 137 of 1088
We're getting a bit more of a narrative now. We check in with the same characters and he's calmed down with the unnecessary (over)use of abstract vocabulary. The humor is coming through as well. I've laughed to myself several times. The 3-4 page footnotes written in biblical size font are tiresome, as are the chapters where we switch to the point of view of someone speaking extreme street slang with no context.
— Aug 29, 2023 04:47AM
