This had a few good insights but is too short to go into any detail.

I waited two months for this book to be available at the library, so I really had high hopes for it. Now that I've finished it, I'm not sure if it was really worth all the excitement. I think when I first put it on a hold, I was still completely confused about Infinite Jest; by the time this book finally came in I wasn't so confused, so reading it did nothing but open up a whole lot of ideas.

If you're thinking about reading Infinite Jest, put aside three months and do it; if you've read it and want to get an idea of where it fits in a larger historical picture, read this book. Ultimately, though, I feel like this book was just a very long thesis - maybe for graduate work, but not much better.

I'm giving it four stars because the guy put in the leg work and hell, if you've read the 1100 pages of Infinite Jest you can knock out another hundred on this guy. But I've gotta say... I'm pretty ambivalent.

a bit of a strange choice, in terms of my own reading goes.
read infinite jest about 2 years ago.
enjoyed it, but fundamentally found it too clever for its own good : an excuse in showing how clever the author was rather than a vividly created world.
this book helped a little, if only in it's demonstration that it is not a book to be enjoyed...

Literally a guide with some useful tools for reading IJ. Read it to accompany my second reading.

A tiny volume about the great big volume. Short and precise -- simply seeing the causality of a few main plot elements in chronological order helped me gain a better appreciation for the structure of Wallace's novel.

El libro más esclarecedor que he leído para esclarecer, a su vez, 'La broma infinita'.

Как же хорошо, когда есть мудрый преподаватель литературы, внимательно изучивший “Бесконечную шутку” и заботливо разъяснивший скрытые смыслы и аллюзии таким как ты. Правда, толкование Шутки занимает всего половину книги, остальное — какой-то избыточный мамбл про поэтику ДФУ, его влияние на мир, внезапные рецензии и прочие дифирамбы. Но за восстановленную хронологию отдельное спасибо, это мощно.

Much of the pleasure reading Infinite Jest is putting the puzzle of its structure and timeline together so my strong recommendation is to not read this until you've read through IJ once because that's a focus of this reader's guide: describing the structure and the chronology. The other big chunk of the analysis is teasing out some of the themes and allusions, so if you like to do that yourself the first time through, come to this book second. Burn provides a lot of context around the novel with chapters on Wallace's poetics, reviews of books DFW published after IF, and a discussion of some writers who've been influenced by DFW. Good guide to have for re-reading and digging deeper into studying IF.

The background of DFW and reception was interesting, could have skipped the actual analysis of the book in my opinion. The most useful part of this was the chronological timeline at the end.

This reader's guide, at 90 pages, is brief enough you could knock it out in one sitting and is perfect if you liked the novel but need a little help sorting stuff out.

I never thought there would be such a thing as too much information on Infinite Jest, and yet, here it is. I appreciated a lot of the background that I didn't previously know and some of the analysis, but some of the references attributed to DFW really seem unlikely. Not that he wasn't an intellectual monster - he certainly was. But I don't think he was as contrived as some of these attributions (such as several Greek myths, Druid calendars and practically cave paintings) would require.

Worth a skim, but not a cover to cover read, even for a diehard DFW fan.

كتاب كويس فشخ بالنظر ل ١- حجمه ،٢- حجم الكتاب اللى بيناقشه. بالطبع اقرأ فخورا ببصيرتى الثاقبة فى فهم الاشياء و ان الكاتب متفق معى. و بالطبع اتذكر اورويل و هو يهدم اى فخر بأى بصيرة بأن الكتاب الجيد هو مايتفق مع ارائك . و بغض النظر عن بصيرتى من عدمها، الكتاب يعمل يشكل رائع لو قرأت الرواية فقط.