The book is light-blue: a cool color, peaceful. As if it's saying, "Don't panic." Because panic you very well might: it's over a thousand pages long, bigger than most textbooks, and a quick flip through reveals paragraphs that go on page after page, nary a chapter break in sight. And one-hundred pages of footnotes. In his introduction Eggers gives his best pep talk, claiming that when you finish Infinite Jest "you are a better person,” and the back cover is full of glowing blurbs; but it remains imposing.
And then in the first few pages you read about Hal Incandenza, a teenage prodigy who reads the dictionary for fun. That's got to be a challenge, a toss-down of the gauntlet. Surely Wallace is saying: "If he can read dictionaries, can't you at least read a measly thousand pages?" It's not as if it's dry reading, after all; when it's not heartbreaking, it's damned funny.
