My sister was the reader in our family. I was the unruly one, not a scholar by any stretch. At the end of each term she brought home a box of books from college. I remember browsing one such box and coming across David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. She told me the book was a popular topic of conversation in English circles—everyone had an opinion on Wallace’s work. I couldn’t have been older than fifteen, yet I was—for whatever reason—determined to read every essay in the collection. Some of the pieces (“E Unibus Pluram,” for instance) might as well have been written in a foreign tongue; I couldn’t make sense of the ideas being presented. However, the essays introduced me a kind of writing hadn’t encountered: verbally playful, intellectually generous, rich in style, and wildly funny. I was able to wrest the book away from my sister and have reread the essays countless times over the years. Still underlined are the dozens of words that were beyond my level of comprehension: glabrous, otiose. recombinant, pablumizing, soterial… It’s a good thing too, as I still have no clue what any of them mean.
