books

Melanie Walsh on what the internet has made of Infinite Jest in its first thirty years: the Infinite Summer read-along, BookTok, the litbro caricature and its feminist critics, and a 4chan literature board that voted it the best book of all time in 2014 (and… again in 2015). She reads the fight over who the book belongs to as a proxy for anxieties about attention, masculinity and reading. Walsh is frank about Wallace’s abuse of Mary Karr, and likes the novel anyway. (My fourth Infinite Jest link this year. I’ve read the book twice, and I’m tempted to go again.)

Readwise (of Highlights and Reader fame) released a new app today, Readwise Books. If you use Reader to read and highlight articles and PDFs, this is the equivalent for ebooks. You can upload files you already own and buy them through an in-app store.

I’ve been beta testing it over the past few months and I really like it. There are some very light social features: the team view it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps.

Access is currently invite-only; here’s my link if you want to skip the queue.

I’m looking forward to Jamie Fisher’s forthcoming book on Elliott Smith. There have been bad books about Smith; they typically focus on the tragedy of the sad-sack musician. The couple of good ones take a broader, more all-encompassing view. Fisher’s sounds like the latter type. It’s been blessed by Smith’s engineer, collaborator and archivist, Larry Crane, which bodes well.

On the importance of deep reading and community engagement to truly understand and “get the most out of” (whatever that might mean to you) books.

Kyle Paoletta on Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous!, which charts the rise of the sensitivity reader and the publishing industry’s habit of capitulating to whichever online faction shouts loudest. Szetela’s position is that it all works as cover for an industry that won’t address its own class problem.

Read-Only Memory’s next book is a 256-page survey of fifty indie games from the past fifteen years, including Hyper Light Drifter, Tunic, GRIS, DREDGE, 1000xRESIST, Genesis Noir, Abzû, A Short Hike and more. Looks wonderful.

Tom Rowley asks publishers, agents and the boss of the Booker why fiction still debuts in hardback when readers clearly prefer paperbacks. The answer is margin; the first edition is a “glorified marketing tool” for the paperback a year later. Indies are already breaking the pattern: Fitzcarraldo has always done paperback-first, and Faber recently published Eliza Clark’s “She’s Always Hungry” in both formats simultaneously. Fine for non-fiction and cookbooks. For a novel you want to shove in a bag, less so.

A growing set of interactive visualisations from Christian Swineheart that map the internal structure of Infinite Jest—its scrambled chronology, endnote architecture, character networks, etc.

An essay on “Peak Indie,” inspired by Chris DeVille’s book Such Great Heights

David Foster Wallace’s novel, in all its immensity, became the subject of sanctification and then scorn. But the work rewards the attention it demands.

With the 30 year anniversary of Infinite Jest approaching, it’s time to look back on Wallace’s 1996 magnum opus and uncover what it can teach us about life in America, now.

This essay is also available on my Substack. Subscribe here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/ In my professional life, I’ve had several bestselling books published by New York publishers, as well as many other titles that sold modestly. I have also self-published a bunch … Continue reading →