mana worm

Readers, I have had another slow board gaming month. It’s tough! I haven’t been in the mood to play anything virtually (through BGA or what have you) and I haven’t found the time to get people together, so not a lot got played. When I have been playing, it’s been my old favorites, which doesn’t make for great content. Is that such a bad thing, though? I’ll get around to new stuff in due time, and the reviews will come out when I do.

On the reading side of things, most of this month was absorbed by Infinite Jest, a mountain of a book that I’m happy to have conquered. I finished a couple more books in early October, but the recaps of those will have to wait for the next wrap-up.

Without further ado, here are my off-the-dome thoughts on September’s reads.

Infinite Jest’s reputation precedes it. It’s got a lot of baggage. Some of that baggage is probably deserved.

But damn, there’s so much here to love. Infinite Jest takes place in a near-future where North America has united into one mega-country, split by an uninhabitable fallout region north of Boston. The winding, complex story primarily follows Hal Incandenza, a junior tennis prodigy enrolled at his late father’s tennis academy. Hal is completely jaded, unserious, and suffers from an inability to be understood by other people, an affliction heightened with his father, whom he was functionally unable to communicate with at all.

This father was also an avant-garde film maker whose lost film, the titular Infinite Jest, is so entertaining that it kills anyone who watches it. Quebecois separatists are trying to get their hands on this film, as are the U.S. government. Don Gately, the closest thing to a second protagonist, is a lifetime burglar and addict who gets tangled up in the plot but ends up in a halfway house attending (and then counseling for) AA meetings.

Gately and his counterpart Joelle Van Dyne were the best parts of the novel. They both start as know-it-all, smug characters like Hal but are broken down by addiction until, ultimately, they cannot hide behind irony or drugs or jokes any more. They are forced to come clean, be sincere, and to give into the power of cliches that would be laughed at in the “cool” tennis academy down the street. It’s beautiful and human and several parts hit me like a laser-guided javelin to the chest.

Infinite Jest’s strengths are in this balancing of the ironic and the detached with the heartfelt and vulnerable. For all of its weaknesses (some of the AAVE and slurs and ableism in this are genuinely so bad, DFW what were you doing, man?), it gets so much right. Infinite Jest understands addiction, ennui, and hopelessness better than anything I’ve ever read, and yet it still comes out hopeful on the other side. What a fucking long read. Great though.

To cleanse my palate a little bit, I went back to Pratchett. Jingo is the next book in the Night Watch series, and it’s the weakest thus far. There’s a lot working against it. It’s ostensibly a political drama, with a staged assassination taking our Watch characters to the frontline of a war waged for fraught reasons. For me, though, once this story leaves the walls of Ankh-Morpork and lands in the sands of Klatch, it loses a lot of steam.

Pratchett’s taking a swing here at anti-Arab bigotry and jingoism but the result is, I don’t know, a weird novel. He’s still trying to mine all these situations for humor and, sometimes, it’s just not the most abundant rock. There are several good scenes, and Sam Vimes is awesome as usual, but the attempt at a complex narrative mostly falls flat. Our characters split up into groups that, at the end, all collide into one big scene!– except most of these little side adventures felt trivial. Usually I’d be enraptured by the charisma and the humor of these scenes, but a lot of the comedy here hasn’t aged well when compared to other Discworld novels. I’ll be continuing the Night Watch series though! I’m hoping for more Carrot in the next one; I love Carrot.

Infinite Jest has a lot of Hamlet in it, so I wanted to read Hamlet. It’s a fun, melodramatic time. The soliloquies are my favorite part by far. I love when a character just speaks to camera about the nature of love or death or something and, my god, we’re witnessing A Master At Work. A lot of this obviously gets quoted and rehashed and yet there’s so many lines that I’ve not seen quoted. Unbelievable take: Hamlet should be quoted more!

I am not really a plays guy but I could see myself going to see a Shakespeare production or two. The idea of pre-gaming a show by reading the play and then seeing how a troupe interpreted it– I can see the appeal, for sure. I’ve probably read eight or nine Shakespeare plays, but most of that was required reading that I was forcing myself through in high school or university. I’ll be revisiting these now that I think I’ve got more of an open mind towards it.