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Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not a Christian – Simon & Schuster, 1957, 1st edition

Things Wot Are On My Shelves – RIP John Keel edition

“Our Haunted Planet” – 1971, 1st paperback ed.

Are you participating in Infinite Summer? If not, you should be¹

Infinite Jest is an enormous yet rewarding read, and is one of my top five favorite novels.

Yes, it looks intimidating, but as Jason Kottke explains in his excellent forward to the project:

It is a fact that Infinite Jest is a long book with almost a hundred pages of endnotes, one of which lists the complete (and fictional) filmography of a prolific (and fictional) filmmaker and runs for more than eight pages and itself has six footnotes, and all of which you have to read because they are important. So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.

So, go out and get a copy right now, and dig in. You won’t be sorry.

Please indulge me for a brief moment while I temporarily shed my normal costume of snark and mount my rhetorical high horse to make a statement that I am very tired of making, yet one that seems to be necessary once again.

Ahem.

Atlas Shrugged is a novel, and a tedious one at that. It is tortured fiction, and nothing more. It is not an effective societal blueprint for pouty glibertarians who are still angry that their mommies never let them stay out past their curfew, they didn’t get the toy they really really wanted for their 12th birthday, and their fraternity of choice didn’t let them into the pledge class freshman year.

Grow. The fuck. Up.

Thank you. Now, back to the snark.

Things Wot Are On My Shelves #4

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, first edition and rare 1st-state printing.