TL;DR
Human connection through literature
I checked out Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace from the library seven years ago. I brought home his behemoth novel, started reading the first few pages, and closed the book. It wasn’t that “YEAR OF GLAD” began esoterically. Hal Incandenza is sitting in an office chair during his college admissions interview. I understood the dialogue easy enough. What moved me to close the book was the intimidation of beginning such an arduous, encyclopedic read. The only reason I checked out Infinite Jest in the first place was because I overheard my artistically intellectual sister-in-law talking about how incredible DFW was. How his command of the English language, using ridiculously long multi-clause sentences, was disciplined and pushed people to think.
I married into a family of academics. My wife and her sisters are voracious readers. They are all creative and wicked smart. My father-in-law is a published poet and was a high school creative writing teacher for over thirty years. Family lore told a story about how he and few other beatnik creatives, were recruited to teach at our suburban high school by Dr. B., a principal who only wanted to hire teachers with doctoral degrees. At Thanksgivings, he would often congregate to the kitchen with the other academics, discussing writing and authors, none of which I recognized. He spoke fondly of some professors, while lambasting others for their rhetorical style and influence on the university’s creative writing program. I would sit and listen, dumbfounded, trying to connect to any part of the conversation. They spoke of books and writers the way I heard my father discuss football teams, coaches, and players.
I wanted so desperately to be a part of those conversations. Unfortunately, I got off to a late literary start as a teenager. I spent most of my childhood swimming in toxic masculinity. Since two out of my three children are dyslexic, I assume that I also grew up with dyslexia, making it cognitively difficult for me to develop a love for reading literature. Men were scientists or athletes, not scholars. I never saw my parents reading. Our conversations, when they were about school, were mainly focused on getting good grades and lettering in track. College was expected, but not academia. I was to be a leader on the varsity track team, not a member of the intelligentsia.
I have since spent most of my adult life trying to catch up by reading all of the books. Any time my father-in-law recommended a poet or writer, I would either borrow his tattered copy, scribbled with marginalia, or check out one from the public library. The writers he suggested I read were challenging. Still, I persevered, using audiobook CDs from the library and CliffsNotes. Looking back, it never really mattered whether I fully understood the themes or allusions; all that he cared about was the conversation.
So, when I picked up Infinite Jest, I was looking to be a part of the broad literary conversation I imagined everyone was having. I’ve since learned that most people attempt to read DFW’s postmodern magnum opus based on similar recommendations and cultural pressure. No one likes to feel left out or stupid. FOMO is real.
Something was different about Infinite Jest. This recommendation wasn’t coming from an elder. My peers, even younger ones, were reading and discussing DFW and I couldn’t keep up. Everytime I Googled DFW or Infinite Jest, the critiques were convoluted and condescending. My father-in-law never talked down to me. He may have had a deep understanding of specific texts, but he never shoved it down my throat; he pointed me in certain directions allowing me to discover things on my own.
I decided that listening to Infinite Jest would help me get through this initial barrier. I checked out the Playaway (this was before Audible), and slowly worked my way through DFW’s prose and 200 pages of endnotes, some with their own footnotes.
I have no shame in sharing that I abandoned Infinite Jest after about 100 pages. The endless tangential endnotes made it difficult for me to follow the narrative. If I’m being honest, I got bored quickly. I realize that DFW wanted to “make the primary-text an easier read while at once allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style without Finneganizing the story.” His circuitous prose was challenging for me, but I also struggled to read Finnegans Wake, so I don’t think it was the length, so much as his fractured, multiple narrative with so many main characters. I like big books. Don Quixote is one of my favorites. I don’t mind slowing down and falling into a 500+ page story, but I need a certain narrative pace to keep me going. I also need some meaningful extrinsic motivation, like the joy of a literary discussion with a friend.
After giving up on Infinite Jest, I became fascinated with David Foster Wallace. I watched a number of his interviews and found him much easier to understand. I loved his anecdote about being The Grammar Nazi at Illinois State University so much that I willed myself to read his April 2001 “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” in Harper’s Magazine, which helped me better understand why my SNOOT mother-in-law continues correcting everyone’s grammar. Maybe I would do better with a collection of his essays?
I read the title essay in the Consider the Lobster collection, but have no strong memory of it. I vaguely remember a lobster festival and some description of a lobster’s nervous system. I’m sure I got so lost in DFW’s details that I couldn’t fully grasp the overall theme(s). I passed over A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, but returned to Shipping Out after learning about a particular DFW sentence from
’s writing experience, The Right Word vs. the Almost Right Word. I had a lot of fun emphasizing the cringiness of DFW’s sentence with my students, and it led to a great writing experience thinking about the craft of sentences.I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh.
I love commencement speeches. I obsessively watch them from early May through July, so it isn’t surprising that I found DFW’s famous commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. This is Water is the one piece of DFW’s writing that I actually understood. Perhaps it’s because I listened to him speak it first, in the same way that I better understand Shakespeare after hearing it performed on stage.
My obsession with understanding David Foster Wallace has waned, but my interest in him remains. I never returned to Infinite Jest, and I don’t imagine rereading any of his essays. I still rewatch This is Water when I’m feeling uninspired or unmotivated. I am curious how a dyslexic kid with a poor literacy childhood, came to read any DFW.
Any time a reader picks up a book, it’s an investment. As DFW says, “a big book means the reader is going to have to spend a long time reading it, which means your burden of proof goes up. Big books are more challenging; they’re more intimidating.”
He’s speaking as a writer of big, challenging books. As a reader, I look to authors as mentors and reading as a mentorship. I treat the books I’m reading as a conversation with the author. The bigger the book, the bigger my commitment to that conversation.
Since the Common Core standards were introduced in 2010, at the elementary level, standardized reading curricula now consists of innumerable decodable texts: short passages followed by comprehension questions. Teachers are forced to eliminate book studies or reading aloud novels to their students in order to make time for the government’s version of standardized reading instruction. Students are reading choppy passages and answering comprehension and vocabulary questions instead of reading, reacting to, and discussing literature. Instead of falling in love with stories, excerpts are picked apart and analyzed. This means that students’ stamina for reading an entire novel has atrophied; they may be able to comprehend a short paragraph and answer accompanying multiple-choice questions, but good test takers don’t always make for good readers.
As a result, students have very little experience with whole novels. In my own classroom experience, students refuse to read any book over 100 pages unless it is a graphic novel similar to the Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Timmy Failure, or Big Nate series. I don’t want to spend time evaluating the quality of these graphic novels. When Diary of a Wimpy Kid was released 17 years ago, I saw many reluctant boys flock to graphic novels, developing a reading habit. However, I believe it is important to stress that students are learning to skim and rely on pictures more than actually read stories. Technology has conditioned them unable to sit and think. Thinking takes time and requires effort, and time and effort are being eliminated in the name of efficiency and high standardized test scores.
I don’t read everything with the same level of focus. I skim, too. I admit to opening a new Substack article that looks interesting, and my thumb reflexively scrolls to the end of the article. My brain is conditioned to compare the length of an article with the amount of effort I’m willing to invest in reading it. I skim a few paragraphs. If I’m engaged, I keep reading, otherwise, I move onto another article. This is the nature of living in such an information-overloaded society. We are bombarded with content1. Most articles come with a reading time posted at the top, so that we can evaluate whether it is worth our time. Our brains are overloaded. We are suffering from information illiteracy; we can’t tell facts from pseudo-facts. It all looks like jibber-jabber, so we stay away from long-form articles in favor of bite-sized summaries.
Some of my favorite middle-grade novels are disappearing from classroom bookshelves and libraries because they are deemed “too long.” They aren’t checking out Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan, Holes by Louis Sachar, Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper, The Giver by Lois Lowry, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume, Ghost by Jason Reynolds, The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor, or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. Basically, any Newberry Medal winner is collecting dust. Booksellers are opting for shorter books to accommodate for shorter attention spans. Teachers are fighting an impossible battle to convince students that reading has value.
One casualty in this Science of Reading melee that I don’t hear enough people talking about is human connection. When my father-in-law gave me a book to read, I knew that I was expected to discuss it with him later. There was no test of my comprehension. I wasn’t being evaluated on my fluency or analysis. He wanted to connect us as fellow readers, and in that connection, converse with the author. Today, when I read a novel, I wonder, what would Mike have to say about this? I reread his marginalia because I miss our chats. I miss connecting with him over literature.
I don’t see my students connecting with books. It is inevitable that an emphasis on standardized testing, boring basal readers, and standardized reading curricula are all having deleterious effects on my students. Many of them do not include reader as a part of their academic or personal identities. Reading is seen as a chore, especially for my students impacted with learning disabilities. Technology exasperates the problem. My students have grown up with pervasive technology at their fingertips. I hand them a laptop on the first day of school, and throughout the year, they struggle to balance technology for entertainment and as a tool for learning. Nationwide, students are reading less. Over one-third of fourth graders are not competent in reading, and more than half of high school graduates are not proficient readers either. Professors are complaining that their incoming freshman students are not able to read effectively.
The physical size of the book is not relevant. I read all 940 pages of Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote because I remember Mike reading me passages aloud, laughing deeply in his belly, and then asking me what I thought of Quixote’s ridiculousness or Sancho Panza’s complicity. The depth of complexity in the text does not matter. I read As I Lay Dying after my mother passed away because Mike knew how much I was struggling with my family. It doesn’t matter if I’m presented with a 50-page novella or a 1000-page epic. What matters is how we connect with literature, humanity, and each other. I want this for my students.
I never finished reading Infinite Jest because I had no one connecting me to DFW or his text. I’ve since watched The End of the Tour and read David Lipsky’s book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. These media helped me develop a swelling of empathy for David Foster Wallace (I’m a sucker for emotional bromances). Both Lipsky’s book and James Ponsoldt’s movie elicited a connection to DFW. Maybe I’m projecting my nostalgic connections to my father-in-law onto DFW. I sometimes wonder if, under different circumstances, I would have stuck with Infinite Jest. I don’t regret not finishing his tome. What I’m most interested in is how I can best recreate these feelings of literary connection with my students. How can I foster a love of literature in my students, no matter how many pages? How can I fight against the status quo of information glut, skimming, and skipping time-consuming texts?
Chip and Dan Heath, authors of a number of books, discuss in The Power of Moments, using four elements when engineering a more meaningful and memorable experience: ELEVATION, PRIDE, INSIGHT, and CONNECTION (they refer to it as an EPIC framework). I see now that my father-in-law was using literature to connect with me. What if I used books to create “synchronized moments” with my students?
When teachers are forced to give students banal passages while TikTok has an infinite number of videos to scroll through, no one should be surprised that kids don’t enjoy reading anymore. As a society, we are not only sacrificing critical readers and thinkers for test scores, but we are losing opportunities to connect with each other. Students are losing valuable lessons in empathy, reflection, metacognition, and beauty. The answer to information glut isn’t to cater to students’ fractured attention spans with disjointed, shorter and shorter texts. Kids need to read actual books. They need to form connections to literature. This is the essence of humanity: art and connection.
I want to be the teacher that helps students, especially my reluctant readers, become book readers; not text decoders, but actual readers of literature. I can’t rely on any scripted, standardized reading curriculum to help my students love literature. This fall, I plan to model reading and discussing literature every single day, providing my students with a consistent practice of reading and conversation.
I want to give my students what my father-in-law gave me when I first started: human connection through literature.
Have a great week!
—Adrian
Resources
Are you looking for some excellent long-form reads? My favorite long-form writers are
, , ( is excellent), and if you can handle it, Tim Urban’s humongous blog posts on, Wait But Why.40 Great Sentences for Students to Learn From by
After the success of
’s writing experience, The Right Word vs. the Almost Right Word, I went looking for more sentences that I could use with my students. This slidedeck by has been a great addition!
An incredible commencement speech that I feel should be required listening for all teachers and those connected to public education.
The Loss of Things I Took for Granted
I’ve been following
on Substack since reading The Knowledge Gap. Her writing has influenced my pedagogy, helping me become a better teacher. I highly recommend her Substack.
The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books
This article from The Atlantic received a lot of air time on Twitter. I resonated with the teachers’ experiences with our district’s adoption of HMH’s Into Reading.
Based on these two slow reads, there are plenty of readers willing to tackle big books. In fact,
is inventorying book clubs on Substack. This directory list is ever-growing, being updated monthly.
- is a fifth-grade teacher I’m aspiring to be more like. His classroom library is incredible. His love of literature is infectious. I highly recommend his Substack for ideas on how to help kids fall in love with reading.
I hate this word!
If only the reading curriculum everywhere could be rewritten according to your preference - and the sooner, the better. For one first-year lit class, I'm trying the DK Literature Book this fall. It provides a romping survey of world lit in a very graphic format - like a graphic novel for grown ups. The students will use this visual book to choose full-length texts that spark their curiosity. We'll read a few in common. We'll see if this helps them bridge back to whole books.
As for DFW and Infinite Jest, there's a funny story. One semester I decided on a "big book" focus for a university capstone course in literature - a final semester course for graduating English Lit majors. I thought we'd read War and Peace together, but I did let the students nominate books and choose their own. They chose Infinite Jest. Gulp. I told them I was game but would be reading it for the first time with them. And we plowed in. I'd have put it down so many times if not for the class. First came the reading experience that you noticed - back and forth between story and notes. Despite the humor of many, the necessity of some for plot points, and the eventual understanding that DFW was structuring a book to combat consumerism and addictive habits by slowing us down, it was still a slog to get through. The book demanded intellectual engagement while constantly interrupting the formation of sympathetic bonds. That continued all the way through, proving (I think) the primacy of the bonds over mental games once and for all. As the book went on, extreme violence and character addiction became further barriers to the reading experience. There came a point when I stopped reading the book before bed, so grisly were the images. I only read the last third or so during high daylight. When it all came together (as it did, thanks to the endnotes), it was very satisfying to the mind. But the heart had to break and stay broken to get there.
At the end, the students were so proud of getting through the book together that they ordered T-shirts saying, "I finished Infinite Jest." The experience accomplished the whole EPIC outcome for them - so that was a win. But it sent me scurrying back to character-driven stories, a little less ingenious. Reading it in a group was essential.
I keep trying to read David Copperfield but it’s a slog. I’d better not even attempt Infinite Jest!