author: David Foster Wallace

name: Steev

average rating: 3.86

book published: 2003

rating: 4

read at: 2011/04/19

date added: 2011/04/19

shelves: own-it

review:
Well, as you might expect, this is great writing, at least the parts of it that are plain english. I hesitated to read it because it was, well, a math book, and the 7 semesters of college math i had to take was enough to last me a lifetime. Although I must say that if I had math teachers like David Foster Wallace, I probably would have liked it more. So anyway the book was a gift but sat on my shelf for a few months but I eventually sat down and read it. It was worth reading, but... I doubt it will be my favorite DFW book ( so far Infinite Jest is the only other one I've read - I like it much more). It's just lots of slogging through a subject that has no real bearing on anything in my life and is also not that entertaining other than the 5% of it that is Wallace saying hilarious little things in footnotes, for instance that Kurt Gödel is the Dark Prince of math. It's alluring in a geeky way but that's about the extent of it. It doesn't make me wiser about life, or help me be a better person, or a better anything else that I am, and it wasn't a whole lot of fun. Those are my criteria for reading a book. But I will give this one 4 stars because I think Wallace did probably about the best job possible of doing what he set out to do.



But you can pretty much summarize the book thus: "Mathematicians and philosophers kept putting off dealing with the concept of infinity for centuries. Finally some guys in Germany dealt with it. They showed that there are different kinds of greater and lesser infinities. This created more paradoxes and problems for the field, some of which still never got solved. David Foster Wallace was a really smart guy and really geeky (even though he may have screwed up some of the finer points of the math)."