o this book is called "Infinite Jest" and it is by David Foster Wallace and it came out in 1992 and it is superlong and profoundly clever and I've been meaning to read it for, like, years and I don't even want to describe it except to say it is about addiction, so here is what some supposedly famous people had to say about it:

"Infinite Jest is a magnum opus" (Rick Moody, The Ice Storm)

"a sprawling and deliciously wicked novel" (Mark Childress, whoever that is)

"A brilliant depiction of the loneliness of addiction and of modern society" (William T. Vollmann, like you've ever heard of him)

"It shows signs, in fact, of being a genuine work of genius." (Some dude who doesn't even get a name credit even though he fucking sweated that review man, sweated it, because have you seen how long this book is? Anyway, he writes for Esquire)

Okay, now let me tell you how big this book is.
This is a book that, when you are eating by yourself at a Korean restaurant, the waitress' one stab at conversation with you will be: "You student?" She will ask this not because you look young but because what you are reading looks like a textbook or, at the very least, something required.
I'm reading it because I am fascinated by addiction and the culture of recovery and self-help. Plus David Foster Wallace makes me laugh and makes me think, and even if one can't endure a thousand-page book, one might want to skim a few sections, like the part about Alcoholics Anonymous that begins on p. 200, which is a thorough and honest and funny discussion of this group that all of us know but few of us really know anything about.
The excerpt below is from a several-pages-long list of things you will learn in AA. It begins, "If, by the virtue of charity or the circumstance of desperation, you ever chance to spend a little time around a substance-recovery halfway facility like Enfield's MA's state-funded Ennet House, you will acquire many exotic new facts..."
Let's read what we shall learn.

"That most Substance-addicted people are addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for addictive-type thinking is: Analysis Paralysis. That it is simply more pleasant to be happy than to be pissed off. That 99% of compulsive thinkers' thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that if they stop to think about it, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind. In short that 99% of the head's thinking activity consists of trying to scare the everliving shit out of itself."

Just thought you should know.

* Sic (Red.)