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Read along with the audiobook

Revisado: 03-04-25

I'm not someone who has a degree in literature or any fine arts. I've never considered myself as someone who devours literature. I'm just your regular casual reader. I purchased a physical copy of Infinite Jest without knowing anything about the book. I was feeling confident that I was enjoying reading so much this winter that I wanted to take on a longer challenge. A friend had sent me a video of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, "This is Water," I thought this might be a good time to check out his written work.

About 130 pages or so into Infinite Jest, I hated it. I didn't get it. I had trouble parsing through all the details accompanying every scene. I stalled on words I didn't know how to pronounce or what they meant. There were too many abbreviations. I got tired of flipping to footnotes and being marginally more informed about the context. I couldn't do 800 more pages of this. It was a slog. I started looking for another book to get my reading momentum back.

I set the book aside for a day or two and thought, Maybe I should restart and try listening to the audiobook while reading. So I signed up for an Audible account and selected Infinite Jest as my book for the month, and away I went.

I've never gone from hating a book to loving it so much as I did Infinite Jest, and this would've never happened without the beautiful narration by Sean Pratt. His energy, his accents, and his tone are perfect throughout. And get this...he reads the full version of abbreviations when the reader might not have enough context to know what they stand for. The audiobook had me engaged for every single page. Turns out this book really IS funny. And it's devastating. And it's witty. And it's heartbreaking. And all the details that take up several pages in describing a scene ARE necessary. I sort of discovered that I'm not the type of person who can extract these sorts of things in a silent reading of the book. I need to be read to like a child.

Reading along with the audiobook was perfect for me. Aside from bringing color and texture to the story, the audiobook did two things for me. 1) I was able to plan ahead and schedule time for how long I was going to read and come to a reasonable stopping point. This helped slow down my reading, and I wasn't just trying to speed-run Infinite Jest just to get it over with. 2) The audiobook helped me sustain reading momentum when I reached for a glass or checked the clock or felt I needed to rub my eyes. The story kept moving in audio form. Sean Pratt's narration flows very smoothly, and the little micro-distractions that sometimes interrupt my reading were no longer relevant.

So if you're like me and have trouble unraveling the complexities of this novel, try reading along with the audiobook. I have a newfound appreciation for postmodern/metamodern literature.

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