Profiles in Boredom: Notes on The Pale King-Part I

Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. Little, Brown, and Company. New York, 2011. 548 pp. 

While this novel is not among my chosen great 100 books to read, I re-read this work over the previous week and a half, in part, because I am planning on reading Infinite Jest this summer and want to have this book as a proper comparison. The Pale King is the first and last book that I have ever "Pre-Ordered," and I read it with delight as soon as it came out. Approximately two years later, I dipped in again. As a longtime devotee of Wallace, I found this work to be his best effort at fictional narrative. Justifying that last claim would take a lot, so I won't pretend to (i.e. justify the claim that it is his best literary effort).

Instead, I'll ask a few rhetorical questions that I often ask of books and will use them to try to saw what is interesting about the book, and why I find it so compelling. The questions respective inclusion of scare quotes are intended to imply that I have no deep justification of these words, but will instead probably take them to mean many controversial, commonplace, or indefensible things peculiar to my understanding none of which I'm interested in specifying or really quarreling about. As DFW would say, talking about, say, the "weakest" aspect of a novel gets very hard, abstract, and tricky (to use three of his favorite words) and the answer to what it means, if I were to get very very clear about it, would probably be unhelpful anyway since it would involve lots of necessary and sufficient conditions that seem odd and mostly out of place in literary discussion. I'll just post the first of these today. My answers won't usually be this long, but I'll indulge this one. In truth, this book is "about" many things, so my answer is really pretty cursory but, I hope, illuminating in some ways. 
What is this book "about"?

Plans Shmans

I'm currently working on a new fiction reading project. Though I have been reading since the beginning of the year, I have performed terribly at posting about my reading (obviously). The basic goal of my new plan is to read many of the works that I have either wanted to read but put off or read some time ago and either forgot much of it or expect that I will read it with considerably new eyes given that I've grown from where I was. To this end, today I sat down and selected 100 novels and plays that fit this description.

For the most part they are not especially ambitious or shocking choices, and I certainly don't aim to be a tastemaker (Lord help me if that was what I was going for). Instead, I want to enjoy many of the works that have already been recognized as great by many people generally smarter, wiser, and more thoughtful than me. Also, in the past I've been biased in my reading habits toward men, and in my list I aim to include more female authors to better build up my sense of the female authorial voice. I don't I'll regret this, but who can say up front. If the future resembles the past, for a few I'll be a bit baffled at why critics find particular works great, and for others I will castigate myself for not getting to it sooner.

I think that I might do some regular posting to get myself in the habit, and I'll post my thoughts on various chapters as I go along. I shouldn't put too many ambitious thoughts here, though, as my track record with these things is bad. I am going to take  encouragement, though, from the fact that I did successfully watch all 100 of the AFI movie list movies in the first iteration of the list--though watching a long movie (like Dr. Zhivago) and reading a long book (like Dr. Zhivago) are obviously different animals. We'll see if I can tame one like I tamed the other.

Philosopher Whim’s Reading Preferences

In this blog I plan to discuss my reading reflections for this upcoming year. My overall goal is to try to record my thoughts on what I read in order to track my reflections as I move forward in my intellectual life. Before recording my first reading posts, though, I thought I would share my thoughts on my current reading practices and trends. 

From my perspective, my reading interests are constantly fluctuating, but from an outsider's point of view they might seem to have a number of common themes. I like to think that while I am not an especially BOLD reader in terms of reading things that no one else does and being unafraid of difficult texts (for I often am 'afraid'--in the "first world problems" sense of 'afraid'). I am, though, interested in a fairly large range of issues-especially those related to empirical psychology, literature (British, American, and Russian mostly), American and European history, social science, economics, and issues in popular natural science. I realize that in many ways this is a pretty limited domain all things considered, but it continues to grow as I age and it is significantly larger than it was when I first began reading seriously (i.e. reading with a self-conscious aim of self-education and edification). I really hope that five years from now I look back and think, "Man, I knew NOTHING--NOTHING--about this stuff that is really darn important." I say that since that is how I feel now about much of my past reading habits, and, like most of us, I expect the future to resemble the past. I know that already within these interests I face the problem of being interested in too many sub-fields and items and that I will never get to the end of all that currently occupies me. As many reader before me has observed, “books beget more books,” and it is hard to “close off” any one area of interest since new ones keep popping up as one continues to read and understand more.


 I've been trained at the graduate level in both philosophy and history, and both of these fields inform most of my reading preferences and biases. That said, I don't really read too much philosophy for fun since it is quite hard indeed and is what I do for my 9-5 job. I love talking about the philosophy that I am reading and/or teaching, and I love how philosophy, pardon the cliché, has changed the way in which I examine various issues.  Outside of what I read in philosophy for my work, though, I generally want to explore issues outside of philosophy, since what I really love in life is to connect with other people over shared ideas. As I see it, if I spent all of my time reading philosophy, then I would be pretty limited in who I could really share my ideas with. Ever since I started my college education, I have been afraid of being that guy who was totally interested in his own research and had no idea or way to connect with other thinkers or regular people. I’m not sure how well I, in fact, have avoided turning this fear into reality, but it is my aim nonetheless. I will always read philosophy and love being able to pick up professional philosophy articles and books and read, understand, and comment on them (and it has been a long and expensive road to accomplish this), but I suspect that, unlike some people I know, this isn’t how I will really change the world.   

I should say that my reading practices are such that I like to have several books going at once, so I should be able to make some contribution to the blog as I go through my weeks. I typically have several books going at the same time, and I also like to be listening to lectures and watching documentaries while I exercise. My standard fare is to be reading at least one text for fun in non-fiction of some sort, one fiction work, one work related to Christianity, one lecture series, and be making progress on some documentary that I watch while working out. That is to say, this is what I consciously recognize as my reading practice. Whether this actually holds, is something that this blog should bear out in good time.