liquidchildren wrote:i've only read Everything and More, but just for that i'll say Not Crap. i got really interested in math for the first time ever after i read that, even though parts were really over my head. really entertaining with tons of weird factoids. i even bought some of the books for further reading that he recommended, something that no other book has got me to do

Agreed. It's also the only DFW book I've read, and though parts were maddening because I didn't understand them, since reading it I've also acquired an inexplicable addiction to mathematics. I even enjoyed the mind-numbing concepts that were too difficult for a person like myself to fully grasp, having had very little college math. But he's so frickin brilliant and fun to read he made me wish I understood things I hated trying to understand during high school and before dropping out of college. And I think that definitely says something.

Or maybe not.

So, based on that, not crap...

washwhatyoueat wrote:So, based on that, not crap...

hah! i just did a double-take looking at that avatar and thinking "is that Jibbles?" and then i was pleasantly surprised to realize it is!

"Infinite Jest" is in my car to read whenever I find myself waiting in it or am forced to enter a waiting room. In this context, I usually never get more than two pages read which means it's taken me a good 7-8 years to get only 1/3 of the way through the book. Furthermore, since I don't read it often, I usually forget what's going on or who the people in the book are. A novel way to read an epic, I should say.

Not crap.

I've started Infinite Jest twice and have yet to finish it. Both times I've made it about 1/4-1/3 of the way through it and that's taken me like 2 months.

I read too slow.