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by zerbin 1426 days ago
I agree, quite accessible, despite its length. I personally would not recommend skipping the footnotes. Though they are a pain, they frequently add so much color and deeply-nested, parenthetical humor to the book. Occasionally you need to look up a word (which is always worth it, because he really knows how to pick the right word), occasionally you get bored in the middle of one of "those" chapters (likely an inevitability that you get some ups and some downs in a 1,000+ page book).

But I totally agree that it just gets more and more relevant and poignant. And completely hilarious. I think that part of the book (and his writing in general0 is undersold. Some of the passages are amusing because of their literary references and wordplay, some are laugh-out-loud funny, the type of stuff that you'll have to read back to someone else immediately because of the extreme mirth you just experienced reading it.

1 comments

As Dave Eggers says in his introduction to the 2006 version of the book:

> A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who, just when he's about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good lowbrow joke.

Gotta love the diddle checks