NoFatty wrote:
Infinite Jest - Wallace
I just started it, so I can't comment on very much about it, but it is a hip book that has gone through the entire hip life-cycle (cool, played out, now ascending back to cool), so there is an opportunity there to use it as a substitute for a personality if that is the sort of thing you are looking for.
Having read this book more than once [for fun!], I can provide some other reasons to read it:
1. It's likely that Wallace is going to be remembered, at least in literary circles, as one of the foremost authors of this time. This being his "greatest" novel (his only other finished novel being an undergraduate thesis, which although unique is still a first novel written by in off-time by a philosophy major at the age of 21).
2. The book seems to describe many of the issues that Wallace struggled with in real life, including depression, inability to properly communicate with others, cultural differences, the future, and as many others as one could hope to fit in 1100 pages of writing.
3. It's an incredibly unique style, replete with Wallace's erudite diction, endnotes (as described by another commenter), dubiously reliable narrators, and some very well-fleshed-out characterizations, and supporting characters who are intriguing enough to make one wish the book was longer.
However, I will caution interested readers... the book is daunting. It's a commitment to try to read, both with the necessary focus, and the potential emotional investment you might end up putting into it. It will take a solid 200 pages at least to get hooked... and then it's about the best 600 pages you'll ever read, and then, really, a dead end. With that in mind, though, I think (for whatever my opinion counts for) that such an ending is truly fitting for the style and content of the book--and from what I understand from the Howling Fantods website, Wallace struggled greatly with how to properly end the book. So it might turn out to be a very frustrating read, on more than one level. And it might cause you to wrestle with some of the ideas presented therein. Not that any of that is a bad thing.
Now that I've completely saturated this thread with glowing praise, I'll suggest some other excellent works:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez-- One Hundred Years of Solitude
Dave Eggers-- What is the What
Toni Morrison-- Beloved (among others)
Truman Capote-- In Cold Blood
Tom Stoppard-- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Samuel Becket-- Waiting for Godot
Jeffrey Eugenides-- Middlesex
Douglas Adams-- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Khaled Hosseini-- The Kite Runner
Chinua Achebe-- Things Fall Apart
Jean Rhys-- Wide Sargasso Sea (after you've read Jane Eyre)
John Kennedy Toole-- A Confederacy of Dunces
Joseph Heller-- Catch-22