I’ve been collecting articles and links connected to the Infinite Summer challenge, and Infinite Jest itself, and three weeks in seems like a good time to share them: if you’d like to participate and somehow haven’t heard of it yet, there’s still enough time to catch up with the other participants!
First, there’s the website itself: Infinite Summer. The challenge is to read the 1,000 pages of Infinite Jest from June 21 to September 22, which amounts to 10 pages a day, 75 pages a week. If you started tomorrow, you’d have to read 100 pages a week: still pretty do-able, even for busy people.
There is a wiki for participants here.
Back in February, our own Elissa Bassist wrote an incredible essay, right here on the Rumpus, about her feelings about Infinite Jest, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining the appeal of the book. (She has 95% convinced me to pick it up in the fall.)
And Scott Esposito, in the course of dismissing some silly qualms about the challenge that another blogger had, offers some interesting reflections on the continuing relevance of a doorstopper published in 1996.
