Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
by David Foster Wallace
Can I count this as read if I only read most of it? I'd really give it 2.5 if I could.
It was okay.
The porn essay was neither funny nor shocking nor particularly insightful, but it wasn't clear if he thought it was anyway. You know what I just read that turned my ideas on porn inside out? Sherilyn Connelly's essay about being a trans woman who likes shemale porn in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Shorter, a little amateurish and rough around the edges, and infinitely more fascinating.
DFW is clearly intelligent (and just as clearly aware of how intelligent he is), and I can appreciate that he favors complex sentences, but mostly I thought it was a lazy and under-edited version of your average New Yorker article. Sometimes with slightly better-than-average observations. But not always.
Also he enjoys lit theory and I have less than no interest in reading dozens of fucking pages about Updike (or whatever the egregiously long one in the middle is---I skipped every lit essay except Dostoyevsky, so I can't remember), so maybe our relationship was never meant to be.
The more I think about the book (and the more positive reviews I read) the less impressed I am. But maybe I'm just grumpy.