Now what?

What did you read after finishing Infinite Jest?

Its a tough act to follow. Might I suggest You Bright and Risen Angels?

Assorted papers, theory books, webcomics, referenceworks, as always, but the next novel I will be finishing I think is The Book of Human Skin, by Michelle Lovric, a review copy from LibraryThing Early Reviewers that I've been meaning to get done. It's so-so. After that will be Primal Tears, our underappreciated author book, and then Herodotus. Librarything is determining my reading life!

1> Great question! I wrote a fan piece/"review" a couple years ago that I've since very recently updated here related to that topic: the question of, basically, after you've been to the top of Literature's Mt. Everest, then what?

I read Donald Antrim's The Verificationist after reading IJ for the first time back in 2001. Reason being, DFW had mentioned Antrim as a contemporary whom he read and respected in that classic salon interview in which he, DFW, practically itemized every one of his influences. I've read the majority of those influences since, and am still reading more of them.

Here's page 2 of that interview (which is standard DFW 101 material, nothing new for the fanatics here) but its enlightening seeing what DFW read spelled out so precisely for us.

Skip to Who are the writers who do this for you? and your colleagues: that's who I focused on after reading IJ.

The interview you mention made me seriously consider reading Ava by Carole Maso next, but I haven't yet bridged the gap between thinking about it and beginning to read it yet. Soon, maybe.

Did anyone decide to pick up The Broom of the System (or read it before IJ?)

Is Ava the one where a friend of DFWs said something to the effect that reading it gave him an "intellectual erection" or something similar, if memory serves?

Ava is out there in innovative-prose/tone-poem land. I've read it; I don't pretend to have "gotten" all of it, or followed all of it, but it was a trip -- one worth taking.

I've still not read The Broom.

"erection of the heart." or as they used to say on MuchMusic, a "heart-on".

Well I have only read IJ and the title story from A supposedly fun thing..... so I still have lots of DFW reading to do. I want to read everything by him. And then of course Im going to read IJ again. And again, probably.

As you know, I"m only really interested in the literature of the past, but DFW is one of the few modern writers that I feel has something original to say.

I'm also interested in exploring further the links between DFW and Dostoevsky. I was kind of jokey about it in my review, but I think there are serious connections and insight to be made, especially in their approaches to the burden of consciousness.