Late last year I joined a literature club at work. The first book we read was 1984 by George Orwell. One of the members mentioned that he loved Orwell and was reading everything of his during the year (2025). When New Year’s Resolutions time rolled around, I happened to watch an uncut interview with David Foster Wallace. I really enjoyed the interview, in large part because it was uncut and you could really get a sense of his personality, but also because it touched on a lot of things that I had been thinking about and continue to think about.

And that’s when it hit me. Why not spent some time (I settled on 3 months) during 2026 on different authors? I called them heroes in my mind at first, but I think most of them will actually be “potential heroes” rather than a person I already view as a hero. Partly, because I don’t have a list of people I consider heroes, and partly because I wanted to explore some different things this year. And I’m reticent to pass judgment on their life and whether they lived up to what they wrote and so forth. Anyway, it sounded like a fun idea, and I chose DFW for the first quarter of this year.

“This is Water” is on my (very short) list of things I read/watch/listen to every year. In the past, I enjoyed Consider the Lobster and Other Essays and devoured Infinite Jest (though I didn’t really try to “understand” it). There is a scene early in the book in which you hear a man’s inner dialog on how he is going to quit marijuana, but for real this time. It is the scene in all of literature which I feel best captures my inner monologue, not the marijuana aspect, but all the rationalizations that he/I goes through. Even though he/I knows deep down that they won’t work. But maybe this time they will. So I have some familiarity with David’s work and I respect his prose and enjoy his humor. I won’t be able to read all of his works this quarter — The Pale King alone would likely take me the entire time. But I decided to read as much as I reasonably could.

Therefore, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been reading some of his essays and stories, watching interviews he gave, etc. I listened to Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and on my pal DFW’s recommendation, I listened to Amusing Ourselves to Death. Impedimentally, I signed up for two books of the quarter at work1, and listened to yet another book of the quarter2 that seemed related to some themes from DFW. Now I’m far behind on Life and Death in Shanghai which is what the literature club is reading at the moment. I don’t think I’ve read this much long-form since high school. I enjoy it. It’s less frenetic and more fulfilling than my normal short-form and headline reading. But less seductive.

And does it count if I mention that I’m watching Sátántangó which feels similar to a book in that you have to slow down and take it in rather than flitting from one scene to the next? Does it still count if I tell you that it’s a very visual movie rather than symbolic/language oriented (I can’t resort to my common trick of listening to the movie rather than watching it)? I would like to read the novel that it’s based on (by Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai) but I’m afraid that will have to wait for another quarter.

Well here we are in February, the time that I told myself I would start writing about the author I chose. Then in the third month (March in this case), I’m going to try to emulate my “hero.” I haven’t decided if I’m going to write a David Foster Wallace style essay or short story or both. What I have decided is that I won’t be writing a DFW novel!

So expect a few more posts on what I’ve been thinking about while reading David Foster Wallace (hopefully one a week for four total), and then some banal, epigonic drivel.

  1. I signed up and bought Thinking in Systems before How Query Engines Work was added to the list. ↩︎

  2. Stolen Focus, which incidentally also recommended Amusing Ourselves to Death. ↩︎