"I like big...

...books, and I cannot lie." Seriously, I don't know why but I've always been attracted to books that can double as doorstops.

Let's take a look at the numbers:

Ayn Rand's Fountainhead = 694 pages
Stephen King's IT = 1090 pages
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon = 1130 pages
Robert Caro's The Power Broker = 1166 pages

And in my current book, David Foster Wallace takes 981 pages, plus an additional 100+ pages of endnotes, to lay out his masterpiece (so I'm told) Infinite Jest. The story, as far as I can tell 147 pages into, concerns Hal Incandenza -- a young tennis phenom -- and is set at the fictional tennis academy in Entfield, MA. I really enjoy the actual references to local landmarks here in Boston: Allston slums, the Red and Green lines, Harvard Square, et al.

In addition to Hal's extended family, including two brothers and his parents, both of whom founded the tennis academy, there seems to be an underlying moral about the eroding nature of pop culture as it's delivered through the television. A certain videotape is making the rounds, and by making the rounds, I mean sucking people into watching it over and over until they actually succumb to it.

Peppered throughout the text are multiple points-of-view, including local dialects that take a couple different readings to actually process...the most poignant passages, however, concern depression and suicide. Once you read these passages, DFW's own suicide seems 10x more tragic.

I'm about 10 pages behind today's deadline, but I've still got tonight to catch up. 10 pages seems like nothing, but when you get a single sentence occupying a full page plus endnotes it takes a little longer than normal. Still, it's very worth the effort -- at least, thus far.

I'm off to the first class of The Beatles today, so I'll leave you with a little taste of what we'll be doing: