Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

For a while, I was switching back and forth between Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace and Shakespeare's Philosophy (see below). I think I've tired out my brain. They both seemed to have at least a tangential connection to my work, so I excused myself for spending an inordinate amount of time on summer days reading instead of gardening, housepainting, exercising or whatever by believing these books would make me incrementally better at my job. Consider the Lobster is a collection of essays. The title essay turns an assignment from Gourmet magazine to go to the Lobster Festival in Rockland, ME into a meditation on the morality of cooking lobster, sort of. The opening essay "Big Red Son" is about the porn industry. Reading "Up Simba" about John McCain's Straight Talk campaign of 2000 was pretty interesting in light of the current campaign.
I have to find a way to get my AP students to read "Authority and American Usage" as part of our classwork next year, though I don't know where I'll get the copies. Wallace is just so visibly rhetorical, and brings in so many connections that his writing will be great for AP.
The pleasure of diction and syntax, the breadth of connection, the occasional "aha!" all combine to make this at least **** But the strength is the weakness: the self-awareness that makes him bring debeaked chickens into the lobster article gets him critiquing his neighbors as they gather to watch news of 9/11; he's never purely in the experience, a piece of him is standing off flipping through the ramifications of it. After a while it is fatiguing. Reading David Foster Wallace is almost as much work as reading Colin McGinn. My next read is going to be a comic book. Here's an interesting blog entry on a couple of these essays (scroll down). Hold on! Go here to read a review (linked on that blog) that articulates the massive plusness coupled with minusness of DFW.