alt Hacker NewsOne of the books I most strongly remember giving up on was “Infinite Jest”. I only got through a few pages and trying to read it just made me really angry. I don’t remember why exactly, but I remember very strongly that it was so unpleasant and annoying for me that I absolutely did not want to read any further. Regardless of how important this book may be according to some. I have no intention of ever picking that book up again. I might miss out on something, but I’m fine with that. There are plenty of other books to read.
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Read [0] and wonder no longer — with the very important caveat that I too have not read Infinite Jest, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy. (I plan on reading it someday, and this has made me more interested in doing so.)
[0] https://mattlakeman.org/2026/03/26/infinite-jest-extraction/
I got to the end and was very angry - it just felt like bad Bret Easton Ellis for the tennis plot (which is a low bar even then) and low grade Elmore Leonard for the drug rehab plot with lots of terrible jokes. There’s so many jokes one will find a few funny but he needed an editor. The speculative fiction parts are easy in hindsight to call off the mark except his riff on Quebec separatism in different direction, and the racism was pretty offensive.