[moseandre]

He is well-known for long, grammatically correct sentences and abundant footnotes. Some of it was fitting in as an academic?

I find some of the writing tough (i.e. impossible to read at night in bed) but the audio book for Infinite Jest narrated by Sean Pratt [1] is really nice. The narrator's speech is somehow easier to follow despite the number of clauses and whatever else in the writing.

[1] http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Infinite-Jest-Audiobook/B0...

[krylon]

The footnote thing tripped me up. Some time after reading Infinite Jest (and Gravity's Rainbow) I decided to take a shot at writing a novel, and I splattered it with footnotes. It was great fun, but it quickly becomes an annoying habit, the kind you know you don't want to do that but you constantly find yourself doing that anyway. (So breaking the habit was exceedingly annoying.)