Is Infinity Jest hard to read?

Is Infinity Jest hard to read?

By hard to read I mean: is it The Sound And The Fury Quentin Section Tier?

Not really. The endnotes can be quite annoying, but that's kinda the point.

no, it's just long

It's tldr the book

/thread

It's not hard to read at all, just long. The only part that is kind of difficult is the Eschaton chapter, and that's just keeping track of acronyms.

>“Infinite Jest” is also, of course, a description of the novel’s structure. The book is almost eleven hundred pages long, but it feels even longer, owing in part to several hundred footnotes, which disrupt the reader’s attention and send it looping backward and forward in an effort to maintain continuity. Even without the distraction of the footnotes—which sometimes consist of pseudoscholarly apparatus, sometimes of extended narrative tangents, sometimes of humorous asides—the text itself is simultaneously fragmentary and recursive. Story lines alternate wildly; some resume after long digressions, some turn out to be nothing more than digressions themselves, and the connections between the proliferating threads are persistently elusive, and just as persistently hinted at. Infinite Jest is, to my knowledge, the longest novel about tennis ever published. It is also a dystopian political satire set on a North American continent menaced by paraplegic Quebecois terrorists and splintered into new territorial arrangements, the most wildly metaphorical anatomy of drug abuse since William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and a tender, heartfelt, coming-of-age story.

>The novel’s Pynchonesque elements—the fact that part of the United States is now a federation called O.N.A.N., the symbiotic relationship between terrorists and law enforcement agencies, the shadowy career of underground filmmaker-turned-tennis-coach James Incandenza—feel rather willed and secondhand. They are impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating: they seem motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off. And some of the novel’s broad satirical intentions—to warn us that corporations control everything and that entertainment is a drug—are familiar bromides decked out in gaudy comic dress.

It was the first book I read in like three years when I read it. It isn't anything like joyce/faulkner/pynchon etc. I had no idea what it was responding to or rallying against but the fundamental message is explicit.

But is it long and boring, like Moby Dick, or long and exicting/happy/interesting like Don Quixote?

I liked it. I also liked Moby Dick though I have never read Don Quixote.

It is not exciting and happy. IJ is often labeled as some grand comedy but it's pretty depressing.