2005 book 4

david foster wallace's oblivion
because i liked infinite jest so much, robert suggested i check out this book of dfw's short stories. unfortunately i thought the last two were the weakest (the second-to-last-one made me wince with every one of its deliberately overused quotation marks, like someone was doing those air/finger quotes every three seconds), but i'm trying not to let the ones freshest in my mind color this commentary too much. :) what i found really interesting was that dfw seems to do equally well with lengthy tomes (IJ) and with a short story that's less than two pages long ("incarnations of burned children" was probably the most powerful of the bunch, although i liked "the soul is not a smithy" and "good old neon" best). one of the things that often annoys me about short stories is that i don't feel fulfilled after reading them, like there's so much more that could be said, but dfw really does a good job with the form. i think that i probably will add brief interviews with hideous men to my to-read pile and consider myself a dfw convert.