Is David Foster Wallace really among that calibre of writers? I&#x27;m reading Infinite Jest and I think I kind of hate it. There&#x27;s some amazing chapters, but I can&#x27;t help but loathe a lot of it. It just feels like pretentious drivel that isn&#x27;t written by someone who has a clear idea of whats occurring, but by someone who wants to write what sounds &quot;cool&quot;. Its almost like emotional pandering. I know he lead a pretty eventful life, but he tries to have so much depth on so many different topics, I get the impression he did the shallowest research time could afford. It would be the equivalent of trying to fit as many highlighted words on a wikipedia page into a paragraph as possible, without understanding what any of them mean. For example, he has some kind of obsession with optics, but every description reduces to convex&#x2F;concave mirrors and &quot;it just works&quot;.