Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

It came extremely recommended and I just found it alright. The famous lobster essay, was second to the essay on the bit of new journalism he did in his coverage of the porno Oscars in Las Vegas. A very crafty writer who doesn't mind coming up out of the text and challenging the reader. He's also not afraid to write with flair. I'll read him again.

I found this book a bit challenging but interesting. I especially appreciate Mr. Wallace's sense of humor. Even when the linguistic issues did not much interest me, the prose was lively and wide-ranging.

Having attempted a novel or two by David Wallace, and found his ficttion prose intriguing in small doses, but too repetitive and dense to take in over the long haul, and consequently having not been able to finish them, I thought I would try these essays hoping that a more factual accounting, or reporting, would help me figure out what has really been on Wallace's mind. I found out quickly that he is more decipherable when in essay mode, but that the agonizing repetition is still there, to the extent that instead of not finishing them, I just skimmed the the denser content.

I do not really enjoy reading that way, but I so admire Wallace's descriptive style that I found this to be a good compromise. I particularly enjoyed his critiques of Updike and Roth, and largely agreed with them. But the difference in reading Updike and Roth is that with them you get the wonderfully descriptive prose, along with a deciperhable plot, and even some humor, and hence some incentive to finish reading them (as a 66-year old male, I have read most of their novels cover to cover). I guess I'm not young enough to fully appreciate the late, and truly great, Mr. Wallace, as he constantly reminds me in his essay about the 2000 McCain campaign.

I really like David Foster Wallace. And not because it's cool, or hip, to like him. I just think he's funny and writes like an ordinary person, only smarter. Too bad he died so young cause he was a good guy.

Reading DFW always makes me simultaneously joyful and sad. Joyful because he writes so wonderfully and makes it seem as though it just comes naturally and easily. Sad knowing that life became so painful for him it was unendurable.

The title essay is a drag down, as DFW obsessed on the right or wrong of eating lobster, which became all but the only topic in the essay, so little less of every other thing he would have been capable of conveying. The rest is DFW at his unique best.

This collection of essays will make you laugh out loud and also think about popular culture and politics and unique and uncomfortable ways. What good writing should do. The essay on the porn industry alone is worth the price of the book.

The writing is deft and fresh. Not simply a great athlete dazzling us with his astonishing talent, but from this amazing spew of great writing emerges a space to gain new perspectives on perhaps well worn subjects. Sorry we lost him so soon. A truly mysterious flash of talent.

David Foster Wallace is one of those authors that you either hate or love. I love him. He has all the snark and condescension of a mediocre white man, but all the intelligence and self-deprecation to charm me out of thinking so. I love his use of footnotes, and his range of interests--he can make anything fascinating. Consider the Lobster is one of my favorite of his works, but I recommend any of his nonfiction/essays.

DFW's genius shines brightly on most of these essays, though I could have done without a couple of them. His insight and tone are razor sharp, funny and poignant at times. I only wish he was still around to entertain with his wit.

Rambling, unedited, exhausting pieces. There is insight and humor throughout the book, but that is offset by tedious footnotes and sentences that just go an on and on (sesquipedalian pleonasm, anyone?). Sloppy work.

This IS NOT a review of David Foster Wallace, but rather of Hachette's horrible presentation of his work. DFW is known for his footnotes. In particular, the essay Consider the Lobster is known for its footnotes. In this ebook, the footnotes are hidden away and must be clicked on each time. Navigation within the essay and between these notes is entirely the opposite of the original spirit and intent of the essay.

First off, in the interests of full disclosure, I corresponded with Wallace back in the Nineties, and he encouraged me as to my writing style in my yet to be published novel (I'm on a third rewrite). So, perhaps this biases me here, though I'm inclined not to think so.

This book should be bought for the essay "Authority and the American Usage" alone. In fact, every incoming American Frosh (ahem, and many an American academic) should have it as prescribed (not in the lexicographic sense) reading....and rereading. It's by far the best work he's done ever in the non-fiction department. It is non-fiction work of sheer genius....and humour too.

The other essays vary in quality---See, I'm not an absolute devotee----and my supposition is that many a reader (like myself) is not going to find the intricacies of the porn industry particularly interesting. The title piece is good, especially given the droll fact that it was written for Gourmet magazine!! I'll not comment on the rest except that they vary in quality and interest from extremely good to slightly less than extremely good. Wallace IS just such a great writer.

But,CAVEAT LECTOR,the last essay "Host" was-pay attention-not written-but DESIGNED by Maria Mundaca and Peter Bernard. The credits are on the copyright page. Let that be a warning as to what lies in store. This essay took me so long to read because I would feel the onset of a migraine after three pages of trying to negotiate "Host."-This, methinks, is just too something-or-other by half for a writer who's already earned his Genius Award. Thus, the four stars.

Go forth and read.

Footnotes with footnotes? Really? I'm all for the fifty-cent word, but Wallace seems a little too infatuated with himself. I was thoroughly unimpressed. Occasionally insightful observations are dwarfed by excessive pontificating and obscure references.

this book made me feel like a worthless human being. it was like david foster wallace was there beating me with a rope and i was on a boat in the rain yelling at him to stop. i never want to feel this way again

but the writing was good and i learned a few words

These pieces do not earn the category "essay". They read like the journalism that they were. I watched Wallace a few nights ago in a 1990s Charlie Rose interview and felt connected to this bright young man. But he writes too casually, letting any thought get into the narrative. The endless digressions sap the energy of the text. I understand that his novels are that way too (i e endlessly digressive). How sad that he was unable to overcome his depression. Maybe he would have matured into a more disciplined writer.

I guess this book is above me. I'm sure other people will enjoy it but it reads like a history book to me. Boring. The first of the short essays is all about the porn industry and Wallace made it as dry as possible.

I had heard about David Wallace from an interview of his old girlfriend and co-suicide girl Mary Karr. What is it about writers? Not being a literary person I was suspect that I would care for his writing, so I picked some essays and his book Consider The Lobster from the library. It was engrossing and his writing is smooth and easy to read. He was a very good writer.

The porn convention reporting was interesting from the standpoint that I lived in Las Vegas and used to go to COMDEX. The McCain 2000 story may have been very much in the vein of another very overrated writer who also killed himself, Hunter Thompson, but it was good nonetheless. I skipped the dictionary discussion and skimmed the Dostoevsky essay. I agree with John Zeigler the subject of "Host," it was a bit of a hit piece, but interesting too. It took until the end of the Tracy Austin analysis for him to get to what Miyamoto Musashi called “The Void” in "Book Of Five Rings." Great athletes’’ brains are wired for their sport and they really can’t explain it to you. The parts of them where reason and language reside don’t control or connect to the physical motor skills parts that make them great at what they do. They don’t think about their physical performance.

It’s a good book and an engaging read.

Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know all about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly smart.

The pieces in "Consider the Lobster" have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper's, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike's `Toward the end of Time', on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka's humor, and on the `breathtakingly insipid autobiography' of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace's (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are:

Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas.
Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine).
Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of "Live and Local" on Southern California's KFI.
Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone).
Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies.

Here's what I like about David Foster Wallace's writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing - it's also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell `footnote'?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force - when it first appeared in Harper's, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner's book (which is just as good as DFW promised).

How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows?

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale?

....... (several other rhetorical questions) ......

Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

And which later contains sentences such as:
Teachers who do this are dumb. ,
This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections.
and - my personal favorite -
This is so stupid it practically drools.

Not everyone will give it 5 stars, but I do.

|TITLE|”CONSIDER THE LOBSTER: And Other Essays”
|AUTHOR| David Foster Wallace {1962 – 2008}
|REVIEWER| Josh Grossman, Colonel {r} U.S. Army Medical Corps, M.D., FACP
• Mentor/Tutor Basic Math
• Men/Tutor United States Medical Examination {U.S.M.L.E. III – Step Three}
• Mentor/Tutor English as a Second Language
|BOOK FORMAT| soft cover
|BOOK PAGES| 343 pages
|BOOK COPYRIGHT| Little Brown and Company 2006
|BOOK ISBN| 978-0-316-15611-0
“Opinion in Good Men is but Knowledge in the Making”
John Milton {1608 – 1674} {1}
As a reader/admirer/respecter of John Updike, “Couples, Rabbit Run, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit at Rest,” I was drawn to pages 51 – 59 where I revisited Updike.
As a Military Man {Chief-of-Medicine 121st Evacuation Hospital APO-SF-96220 Evacuation Hospital – Commanding Officer 548th General Dispensary APO-SF-96301} having served in and during our Far East Deployment with hard-scrabble, impoverished soldiers, I nodded while reading of towns where joining our Military Reserve Units was, “What you do to pay for college.” Yes! Most Certainly! Indeed you do exactly that!
Most delightful was the presentation, in this outstanding text, of the appellation, “SNOOT,” (2), all capital letters. Who else but David Foster Wallace has the chutzpah (3) to write, “SNOOT?”
All City, County, and University Libraries should have a copy of this exemplary text. All incoming College and University First Year students should have a copy to discuss with their Mentors. Respectfully recommended for students for whom English is their Second Language.
This illuminating text is but one of the many that the author bequeathed to us, to all of us. May David Foster Wallace (1962 – 2008) Rest-in-Peace and May His Memory Always be for a Blessing!
REFERENCES:
1. Blind Poet, Author-of-Paradise Lost
2. A person who shows contempt for those considered to be of a lower social class
3. Yiddish: Audacity
Respectfully submitted: Josh Grossman, Colonel {r} U.S. Army Medical Corps, M.D., FACP

This collection features essays on topics as broad as the porn industry, the humor in Kafka's work, John Updike's penis obsession, and conservative talk radio hosts. Once again, my mind was pretty much constantly exploding while reading these essays. DFW has this way of making me feel at once really stupid (How have I never thought about that? What does that even mean? This is kind of over my head.) and also kind of smart. (Hey! I get this part! I'm learning new crazy new concepts, and now I know what words mean!) Although he uses a lot of fancy vocab that I'm not familiar with, I like the way he makes me work for my understanding. I have to look up words in the dictionary to understand his points sometimes, and that is rewarding.

One of my favorite pieces was "Authority and American Usage," a 60-page review of Bryan Garner's new Dictionary of Modern American Usage. I'm interested in grammar, and this essay tickled all of my fancies. In addition to talking about the merits of this book, Wallace discusses the differences between the two schools of grammar, prescriptivist and descriptivist, and makes really interesting arguments for and against them. I had no idea there WERE multiple approaches to grammar usage and my inner word nerd was totally fascinated.

"Up, Simba" is about Wallace's week as a Rolling Stone journalist on John McCain's campaign trail before the 2000 primary. He describes (the totally unglamorous) life on the trail, contemplates the inscrutability of John McCain as a person, and offers really interesting insights into campaign strategy. I was intrigued to learn exactly why saying, "I'm not going to vote because I don't like either candidate and I don't want to participate in the system," is invalid. Essentially, if all the moderate people don't vote because of apathy, only the more extreme people entrenched in their parties will vote, and they will vote the way their parties tell them to. So if you don't vote, you're effectively voting for the party-backed candidate.

The title essay was one of the most fun to read. DFW covers the Main Lobster Festival, where thousands of people flock to eat lobster and take in the "local flavor," which of course is destroyed by the thousands of tourists descending upon the region. This is really only a tiny part of the essay, though. Mostly, Wallace is concerned with the ethics of eating lobster. Do lobsters feel pain? If they do feel pain, do they have the emotional capacity to experience it as unpleasant? Why, at the MLF, is the World's Largest Lobster Cooker such a highly advertised spectacle when a World's Largest Killing Floor at the Nebraska Beef Festival would be totally unimaginable? It's a really entertaining, thought-provoking essay about our relationship with the food we eat that raises questions about how we justify eating living things.

I loved Consider the Lobster and Other Essays; David Foster Wallace is entertaining, funny, informative, and incredibly smart. Sometimes the footnotes-within-footnotes are difficult to follow (especially in "Host," which uses mapped boxes connected by arrows instead of actual footnotes), but the added insights were always fun to read.

Some words I had to look up:

Solipsist, synesthetic, satyriasis, anomie, senescnece, dysphemism, solecistic, salvos, pleonastic, sesquipedelian, heliogabaline, abstruse, autotelic, involuted, androsartorial, lapidary, cancrine, amentia, hortatory, synechdoche, athwart, gonfalon, luxated, germane, prolegomenous, nictitating, torsions, styptic, jingoistic, atavistic

More reviews at Books Speak Volumes, a book review blog.

This was the first DFW I've read since Infinite Jest, which I read a few years before I started reviewing books here, and I'm still firmly rooted among those in awe.

I enjoyed all of the essays in the collection, but I'll only mention two: 'Certainly the end of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think,' and 'Up, Simba.'

In the former, the late writer had me at hello, so to speak, when he referred to Mailer, Updike, and Roth as the 'Great Male Narcissists' (GMNs) in his first sentence. Unlike Foster Wallace, who relates that he read around twenty four of Updike's books prior to penning the essay and considered himself an Updike fan, I've only read one novel by each of the GMNs and have had no desire to go back for a second from any of them. The breakdown of Updike's Toward the End of Time that follows is hilarious and written as only DFW could.

In 'Up, Simba,' DFW is assigned to the 2000 McCain campaign by Rolling Stone, and it's fascinating today, in my opinion, 5+ years removed from McCain's 2008 run for President, to read his firsthand thoughts on McCain's politics and strategies, and the ways in which campaign decisions are made based on perceived voter psychology. Also interesting to read about the differences between A list reporters and everyone else, and DFW's details on the lives of the various crew members working the scene. As is often the case with Foster Wallace, the essay comes with its own lexicon, in this case campaign tour terminology, something that would likely get on my nerves from just about any other writer, and yet I loved it from him.

I look forward to reading more of DFW's work, and only wish that he were still alive and writing.

While I was disappointed by the uneven quality of Wallace's collection of short stories ("Girl with Curious Hair"), I found this collection of essays to be extraordinarily good. I first stumbled on Wallace when I read his commencement address delivered at Kenyon College ("This is Water"), which is as fine a speech as I've seen. This collection of essays does not disappoint -- Wallace is an engaging and very funny essayist.

Wallace is very interested in popular culture. His opening essay on the "Oscar" type awards given at the annual convention of adult films explores this element in our culture. Wallace's trick is to be given press credentials by some avant garde magazine and then mingle with the press and participants at the covered event, providing an outsider's perspective. While the piece is often very funny, he makes his points quite well, particularly concerning the inherent misogyny of the industry.

Similarly effective is Wallace's brief stint on the 2000 campaign trail with John McCain. This is the pre-2008 McCain, when he was something of a sensation as a fresh, honest voice cutting through the BS of contemporary politics. But when he starts to win, we see some of the portents of 2008. Wallace's discussion of the alienation of young voters, the appeal of McCain, the great soul-sucking machinery of modern political campaigns, and the "inside-baseball" of what really happens on the campaign trail is terrific.

There are three pieces of literary criticism that are all quite good. Wallace absolutely eviscerates the vapid narcissism of Updike and his contemporaries. It is the most effective piece of negative criticism I've ever read, and it's very funny. His piece on Dostoyevsky points out the appeal of the great man and the inability of modern writers to grapple with the great issues the Russians so brillianty explored -- for fear of becoming the butt of irony and ridicule.

Wallace's piece on September 11 is very personal and moving. Unlike his stories, some of which strike me as cynical and self-loathing, his essays draw the reader in. The reader likes and wants to meet the author of Wallace's essays; the author of his short stories is something else again.

On the whole, this is an excellent collection and makes me want to go back and read some more of Wallace's fiction.

This is a great book of essays as an intro to David Foster Wallace's work, his essays being much more accessible than his fiction. The collection has a lot of variety in terms of topics (which include the porn industry, John McCain, talk radio, Maine lobster festival), and he somehow packs each essay full of information and ideas without being boring or unnatural, and then he always takes you in a different surprising direction so that reading his stuff is also exciting and fun.

He's funny! I laugh a lot at his descriptions and observations. He laughs at himself a lot; his personality always comes out in each essay. In addition he's a crazy genius whose brain is always on a million different levels and compelled to be painfully conscious of every aspect of everything, hence his footnotes and nested parentheses as he dissects the most random topics.

I love the essay on Tracy Austin's sports memoir (start with this one or the title essay), which manages to be a summary of both tennis and Tracy Austin's dramatic, glorious, tragic career, and also kind of a brutal critique of her memoir and possibly her thoughts as presented through the memoir. And yet DFW manages to tear her apart while holding her skills and accomplishments in total reverence so that you feel simultaneously sorrow and awe for her. He then goes to the question of why this memoir is so disappointing to him: because he's hoping they'll reveal what it is that makes top athletes gods among men, and then he forms his own theory on [paraphrasing] "what keeps us on our respective sides of the tv screen". I don't even care or know anything about tennis (or anything about the topics of most of his other essays), but his ideas and observations are so interesting that, while following his ideas can be disorienting, you feel safe being led by the hand of an amazing writer.

The day DFW hanged himself I was shocked: I felt it was the first time someone I knew had died, which is erroneous because 1) I don't know him, and 2) people who I did technically know have died before (I feel I owe them an apology somehow for having this reaction to DFW). I had just assumed he'd be one of the great living writers of my time, that he would age as I aged, that he would continue writing stuff for me to read for the rest of my life. But suddenly this wasn't true anymore, suddenly these books were all the books he'd ever write, and I couldn't just cherry-pick his stuff anymore and one day I'd have to finally finish infinite jest, etc. And it wasn't because of some kind of car accident or something- he'd done this to himself and on purpose, and all of this was just such a shock that I stopped eating meat. It's embarrassing to confess that part of why I stopped eating meat is to somehow preserve his memory (read Consider the Lobster, which he wrote for gourmet magazine). I know that sounds stupid and weird but that's how much I liked his work and how much of an apocalypse his suicide was in some ways.

I came to Wallace through his fiction, which I love, but after reading this collection I realized I like his nonfiction even more.

His command of the language, his insight, and his laugh-out-loud wit are all just as much in evidence in his essays, but the essays have the advantage of being more coherent, and shorter.

The title essay, Consider the Lobster, is one of my favorites. Originally published in Gourmet magazine--amazingly--it describes a lobster festival in Maine in all its comical details before musing about the ethics of cooking and eating the creatures. Wallace somehow manages to combine hilarity with deep compassion; I found it one of the most persuasive anti-animal cruelty pieces I've ever read, although I don't think Wallace thought of it as that, so much as just musings about the subject he was commissioned to write about. But when Wallace muses, he often comes up with fascinating angles.

There are other essays in the collection I enjoyed almost as much--one about Updike and his narcissism, for example--and several that I didn't find as interesting. The long piece about the adult movie industry just didn't do it for me, nor did his lengthy and byzantinely-footnoted essay about a right-wing talk radio host. Sometimes the level of detail-within-detail just isn't justified for me by the subject matter, but of course, others may find the subjects of those essays more interesting than I did. But anyone who appreciates well-crafted, thoughtful, and funny prose should find something in the collection that's appealing. As soon as I finished it, I started his earlier collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which says something about how much I enjoyed this one.

I loved this book. I found it funny, sad, fascinating and intriguing. The topics varied, but what I saw as Wallace's desire for meaning, sincerity, and something real showed up again and again. This is one of my favorite books.

I must warn you, however, that this book was my selection when it was my turn to choose the book for my book club, and no one else in the club felt even remotely the same way I did about the book. In fact, many of them didn't read most of the essays, saying that they found Wallace to be arrogant and that they couldn't figure out for whom he was writing. A couple of the members were upset because they didn't know all the words Wallace used and they considered themselves to be highly educated.

What I learned from that book club meeting is that this book in particular and Wallace's work in general tends to be well-received by certain types of readers.

The question is whether you're the type of reader who is likely to enjoy his work.

My best guess at the criteria for enjoying Consider the Lobster is

You like to think about things that are out of the ordinary or unusual
You like to read about other people thinking about things that are out of the ordinary or unusual
You are willing to think about things like the fact that lobsters are boiled alive when they're prepared for human consumption
You are highly interested in language usage and either have a large vocabulary or are willing to look up words you don't know
You like to read essays that include a great deal of thought about all sides of the issue at hand. If you want something simple or easy or something you might read in the mass-market consumer magazines, I would not recommend this book, because, in Consider the Lobster, Wallace goes into great detail and depth about all sides of the issues he explores.
You are not daunted by an author using a lot of footnotes.

One of the reasons I love this book is that I found it satisfying. Yes, it required a good deal of work on my part, but I felt that work was rewarded. If you are the type of reader who prefers to read for pure pleasure or escape, you may not enjoy this book.

If you do think this is the sort of book you would enjoy and you put in the effort, I think you will end up really liking it.

When reading DFW it feels as if I'm on a round the clock rendezvous and always coming up short; racing around corners just to catch a glimpse of his genius. And now, sadly, the rendezvous has left our solar system.

"Certainly the End of Something" is so hilarious and pocketed with truisms that it felt as if I had been given a wafer after confession. Later, in a crispish speech DFW feeds Kafka in hilarious hand signals and laser beams launched from the podium. "Authority and American Usage" will pick up the english language, smash her to bits and pieces and defend each one with meaning. The footnotes alone. Gulp.

"Up, Simba" is quite possibly the best written satire of elections, and life on the political bandwagon; before anyone raises a hand, DFW is quite fair quite fair quite fair with use of lighting when painting The Maverick's portaiture; he begins with the definition of a hero, and then slyly hands the reader a bus ticket. Even though the election has come and gone, political minds who have not yet sampled this smattering piece of hipspeak will want to dive in. Having travelled these roads myself, it is heartening to know the fly on the wall DFW is there recording the truth of it all. Segue finds me walking through lobster carnage stripping substance from the shores of Maine. This facebook title is so hilarious for the sheer happening that DFW is writing for Gourmet magazine, and this is what he serves up! -- even if you are a knee slapping carnivore your eyes are sure to bug out, especially the footnotes in this essay regarding the way we go about killing our dinner. Not even upscale prices can keep the mind from wandering back to the inhuman way the meat's been brought to your plate. Dig in.

DFW winks back at the reader and possibly saying, "I hope Tracy Austin isn't boring you." Then he truthfully takes aim at yawn ghost writing and yawn more athlete biographies.

Winding through these pages there is just SO MUCH that the reader must ingest. And truly, if you plan on acting like you know much of anything at all in this life, then there is no possible way you can get away with not reading DFW. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, the question is this: can you live with yourself if you don't read him? There is no other writer who questions the reality of every situation more, and who aptly sums up human behavior. And I come away with the surest sense of reality and absurdity that we are all primates now.

I'll start off by saying that this book has propelled David Foster Wallace to the status of my favorite author. First, he's taught me that one could learn as much from fiction (and with his genius insights, more) as you can from non-fiction. Second, no matter what he writes about, it's interesting, or at the very least intriguing. So what's his non-fiction like? Every bit as exciting as his fiction. Filled with mind-blowing insights and practically inhuman amounts of knowledge. He appears to understand every topic he talks about well beyond surface level. In the essay "Consider the Lobster," he makes what's probably the most compelling (unintentional) case for vegetarianism (or at least compassion for living things) from a non-vegetarian. My favorite thing about his writing here, I think, is that I don't finish reading and want to die of depression, like reading Chris Hedges does, yet it's every bit as much of a genuine learning experience as any other non-fiction I've read and in many ways, better. Another great thing about this particular collection is that there's no sub-par (though I'm sure most DFW readers would agree his par is much higher than most writers) stories (there was one or two of those in "Brief Interviews..."). I would've really loved to look forward to his perspective on, well, everything in the future, but at least we'll have The Pale King. And if I can memorize these essays I'd have some kick-ass arguments on my side. At least I can look forward to working on that.

Some of these essays I've already read because they were translated in Italian from time to time; others I didn't and like them, others were not so interesting, but all of them were wonderfully written. There is nothing better than reading a book of DFW every year, just to remember what is really writing about.

Alcuni di questi saggi li avevo giá letti perché pubblicati in italiano; altri non li avevo letti e mi sono piaciuti molti, altri un po' meno perché l'argomento non mi interessava poi tanto, ma tutti sono stati scritti con la sua meravigliosa prosa. Non c'è niente di meglio che leggere almeno un libro l'anno di DFW, solo per ricordarsi che cosa significhi veramente scrivere.

I have to admit, I was excited when I first heard that this was coming out. DFW's previous essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing..., was so completely engrossing and entertaining that it changed my expectations of just how good essays and essay writing can be. Reading that book made it clear that, much like with Joan Didion, the essay format just seems to suit DFW (albeit for difference reasons).

It practically goes without saying, then, that I had high expectations for this book. And for the most part, they were met. Except for the handful of essays I'd read previously in various publications, they were all new to me. I'd most anticipated reading the one on John Updike, however, since I've seen it referenced repeatedly, by various authors and for various reasons (not all of them good). I was somewhat surprised, then, when it turned out to be more reverential and less of a hatchet job than I expected. Although it was critical, it was also very funny, and really hit the mark.

The essay on American usage, which I'd read before, again failed to draw me in, while the essay from which this book gets its title is a classic DFW story-within-a-story. In it, DFW takes a trip to Maine to cover its lobster festival, only to use that as a starting point to discuss the very relevant and very complex issues of bioethics and animal rights. He expertly lays out the issues and arguments, but smartly stops short of answering any of his own questions. The essay on September 11 is a detailed and personal account of the events of that day, which he ties into a discussion of his life in small town Illinois, as well as the life and culture of his neighbors and fellow townspeople.

Beyond that, the essays in this book run the gamut, taking in everything from the adult video awards to the unique challenges of translating Russian literature to the niche that is sports biographies and finally ending up with his Atlantic Monthly story on political talk radio, in which he really lets loose with the footnotes and asides, in a manner that suggests that, for him, writing footnotes and asides is a compulsive behavior, and one which he is only marginally successful at containing.

David Foster Wallace is good at delving into the imponderable. I particularly enjoyed his book about the history of the contemplation of infinity (Everything and More). Here he takes on similarly heady topics, with some lighter themes mixed in.

One standout is the title essay, which explores the issue of animal sentience, the question being whether the inner life of a lobster is anything remotely like the inner life of a human. There is simply no answer to this question, and philosophers who have tackled the question in recent years have bungled it extremely badly. Consequently the most one can do is to contemplate the implications of certain answers, and DFW's essay on the topic is as good as any I've come across.

Perhaps the only thing more impenetrable than the mind of a lobster is the mind of John McCain. Here's a guy who is so principled that he apparently refused to be released from a P.O.W. camp because it violated the letter of military policy. Yet he can be seen regularly cowtowing to the likes of Jerry Falwell and G.W. Bush just to gain a few points with the lunatic fringe of the religious right. DFW followed McCain during the 2000 campaign, and his essay comes as close as is logically possible to explaining how these various attitudes can inhabit the same brain.

DFW's writing style is not for everyone. If you're a fan of Hemingway you might find that it makes your head hurt.

The author says to us that it's okay to question. He says it's okay to be the smartest person in the room. His prose is so wonderfully nuanced that I found myself rereading portions of it. What a shame that he no longer can share his talents with us.

The collection of essays features David Foster Wallace's insights into worlds as disparate as the porn industry and the Maine Lobster Festival. His erudition is filtered through a popular and provocative voice whose sardonic humor reflects a general acceptance of modern life.

Wallace's shorter essays are where he's at his best, sometimes playing the role of the critic, as in "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," and sometimes packaging tremendous poignancy in with surface humor ("The View From Mrs. Thompson's" is one of the best essays on 9/11). While his longer essays capture intriguing topics (life on the campaign trail with John McCain, the inner psychological workings of a radio disc jockey, etc.), they start to become a bit tiresome in their organization (or lack thereof). Wallace includes footnotes or sidebars as written subtexts, and while they are witty and often important, they do constantly yank the reader away from the essay itself in a manner that might infuriate some readers.

The author's real gift is to capture vignettes of the mundane and turn them into opportunities for social critique. Even though he does this with varying success, he is able to combine intellectual conversation with absurdity in a way few authors can. Peter Grier, of the Christian Science Monitor, described him best when he called him a "snowboarder with a PhD."

I liked this even more than A Supposedly Fun Thing... This one too ranges, subject-wise, across the map but I found the subjects more to my liking. The lobster piece considers how basically stupid and arrogant is the idea that lobsters don't suffer when boiled (duh). Other highlights include an informative inside look at the film porn world, Kafka, a heavy long piece on grammar and literature, midwest America's view of 9/11, Tracy Austin's lame autobiography, and an everything you could possibly want to know look at the world of American right-wing talk radio. All of this delivered, as always, with Wallace's fine humour and warmth.

Consider the Lobster is a collection of muscular essays from the late David Foster Wallace on an absurdly wide range of topics. Each of them was commissioned by a particular magazine with a particular topic, hence Wallace's tendency to direct his voice at his readers like a canon. However, Wallace can never be contained by the banalities of his topic here. His work on the AVA's is a particularly damning portrait of the pornography industry, in all its unimaginable insanity and sadness. I particularly like the piece on the American Usage Wars, which involves an impressive demonstration of Wallace's knowledge regarding the history of English grammar debates over the course of the last several decades. Not all of the pieces here are great-the one on McCain in particular is repetitive and mundane. And DFW's tendency to use lengthy footnotes to 'fragment the linearity' of his text is a mere affectation. Still, this represents the work of a great mind, whose creativity and intellect will sorely be missed.

The only reason this has 1 star is that it is MISSING an essay in the Kindle file version. It is missing the Host essay published in the Atlantic in the Kindle version. Ripped off because it is missing a whole essay. Classmates had softcover copies of the amazingly layered essay and it's not there in the Kindle fire version.

I tell people to read DFW's nonfiction before they read his fiction, because I think you get a good sense of the type of guy he was: a hyper-aware observer of his surroundings. On top of that, he had to be one of the most humorous observers as well. There are a lot of hilarious encounters and situations here, but also a lot of dense and thoughtful reflections on the way the world works. Consider the Lobster might be a more consistent collection than A Supposedly Fun Thing, and in turn a little om that regard. Again, the writing is incredibly verbose, so don't enter into reading it lightly.

Extraordinary. Keen powers of observation combined with the utmost command of language. Poignant and funny. I adore DFW’s nonfiction writing. I know his fiction is hailed as among the best but I find his nonfiction to be as compelling, entertaining, and engaging as any others’.

David Foster Wallace is arguably one of America's greatest living writers. While he's probably best known for his fiction, particularly Infinite Jest he really shows his range, humor and intellect with his non-fiction. In Consider the Lobster, he examines everything from Kafka being underappreciated as a humorist to covering the Adult Video News porn awards in Las Vegas. While some of the essays feel a bit dated (most of them were written pre 9-11) the writing hasn't lost any of its bite or edge. It's hard to write about CTL as a whole because since its simply a collection of largely magazine articles that appeared in everything from Harper's to Gourmet magazine, and the eclectic nature and wide variety of topics makes for an interesting reading experience. The one thing that does tie it all together is Wallace's prodigious writing talents and the lens with which he views the world, which is both urbane and cerebral yet grounded and playful. When you put the book down, you walk away with the distinct feeling that DFW could dissect any topic or subject and bring it to life. The following is a brief summary of each essay:

BIG RED SON - the aforementioned essay on the porn awards. Shows the porn industry in all its self-important, crass, tasteless glory, and also shows how at the end of the day it really is just a business like any other. LOL funny at times.

CERTAINLY THE END OF SOMETHING OR OTHER ONE WOULD SORT OF HAVE TO THINK - a review of John Updike's Toward the End of Time. The least interesting essay in the collection. Unless your a fan of Updike, you can safely skip this.

SOME REMARKS ON KAFKA'S FUNNINESS FROM WHICH PROBABLY NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN REMOVED - DFW laments Kafka being underappreciated as a humorist and on a deeper level how the idea of what humor is has changed dramatically.

AUTHORITY AND AMERICAN USAGE - A brilliant essay on just what makes a dictionary authoritative and who decides what is "correct" in a language, particularly American English. A bit dry and academic at times, but my favorite essay in the bunch.

THE VIEW FROM MRS. THOMPSON'S - Half essay on patriotism and half memoir on what DFW was doing while the events of 9-11 were unfolding. Certainly the most straightfoward of all the essays and the most gut-wrenching.

HOW TRACY AUSTIN BROKE MY HEART - Excellent essay on the insipid nature of sports biographies, and how this insipidness reveals how many brilliant athletes are genius in a way that the rest of us have a hard time relating to and understanding.

UP, SIMBA - DFW trailed John McCain's campaign trail for a week during the 2000 election as a correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine. Excellent political piece.

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER - Do lobsters feel pain? An interesting moral and philosophical essay that falls flat because it doesn't really answer any of the questions it poses.

JOSEPH FRANK'S DOSTOEVSKY - A largely academic essay on Dostoevsky and the nature of contemporary literature.

HOST - Excellent and experimental essay on talk-radio host John Ziegler and an exploration of why talk-radio is dominated by right-wing pundits.
It is a bit difficult to read due to the experimental nature of how the footnotes are arranged, but well worth reading.

Recommended.

I read so many books that I rarely read one that I would consider the "page turner." CONSIDER THE LOBSTER not only fits into that rare catagory, but it is a work of non-fiction, the half of the bookstore I barely read.

David Foster Wallace's essays cover a large range of topics with a sort of disbelief; his irony and rhetoric monitors are turned on high. The most interesting aspect of this collection is not that the topics are thoroughly explored and grippig, but that the reader can start to sense what kind of person David Foster Wallace is.

This collection has commissioned pieces from "Premiere", "Rolling Stone", and "Gourmet" and all three essays prove that DFW does not enjoy social gatherings, has no use for topics like porn, politics, and food (how much of a difference is there between these three?) but has the capabilty to find enough things to write about that the printed article has to be cut to fit the magazine's space (in the case of "Rolling Stone", the piece DFW turns in is so large that it would take the entire print portion of the magazine and some of the ads.) Even still his relative boredom and disgust does not get hidden by any means. The best example of this is "Big Red Son", the essay written for "Premiere", which is him attending the 1998 Adult Video News Awards. Throughout the essay, you can tell that DFW is not amused or entertained by the movies or adult film stars but feels rather lonely in this setting.

His lack of enthusiasm in his commissioned pieces drive them the same way his enthusiasm drives his more literary explorations.

The best essay in the collection "Authority and American Usage" works because DFW is so engrossed in the material (the language battles) and his final assessment that the long essay (over sixty pages) is engaging enough to read in one setting. The idea that he is more interested in literary thought than worldly thought carries over into "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" and "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed", both of which display more thought and interest by DFW than his more regular subjects.

As a whole this collection represents David Foster Walace as a more interesting and talented writer than many others, and CONSIDER THE LOBSTER is further proof of his genius. (He did win the grant.)

David Foster Wallace can write up a storm and, if the topic interests me, I'm there. The problem is too many of these essays culled from various publications Wallace wrote for bore the heck out of me.

I enjoyed his visit to Las Vegas for the annual AVN awards as it was both hilarious and penetrating (excuse the use of the bad pun given this was an awards show honoring the "best" in porn video). I also loved most of the essay on the Maine Lobster Festival but he went too far in trying to get to the bottom of whether lobsters felt pain. At first, it was fun to debate in a sort of late at night way you may have debated anything in your youth but it just went on and on with no end in sight.

The same with the other essay I slightly enjoyed about tennis star Tracy Austin's autobiography and how athlete biographies often fail to measure up. Wallace so often repeats himself and not so much hammers home a point but dulls it to death.

The stuff on writers or politics just put me to sleep. The essay on US lexicopgraphy interested me because I work in editing but it too quickly made my eyes glaze over.

Maybe Wallace just needs an editor to reel him in as he does write well in spurts. It just did not work for me as I guess I'm more of a Chuck Klosterman or P.J. O'Rourke fan when it comes to essayists on modern culture.

My favorite books are the ones that stick with you for days and days and days after you read them, books that imprint themselves all over your brain so that when the neurons are flashing about in your cerebral space, they always seem to illuminate the cache of insight and language of that one book. My favorite books are by authors who start to annoy your friends because you inevitably wind up talking about them everywhere you go and no one really cares what Cormac McCarthy might think of the fiscal cliff.

David Foster Wallace and his essay collection Consider the Lobster are just that kind of pair. The title essay is by no means one of my favorites and yet the other day, as I was searching the Shoreline Central Market for some rosemary bread, I saw those lobsters roving about their glass cages, claws pinched together by white plastic bands, and I instantly thought of Wallace's essay and of the socioeconomics of seafood and the ethics of live seafood captivity and of Upton Sinclair's harrowing vision of US food production circa 1900 (something, I should add, that Wallace doesn't actually mention).

Now, I think I can boil this lingering synaptic activity down to a few things (boil it alive!) that everyone always seems to say about David Foster Wallace and this particular collection.

The essays in Consider the Lobster are crazy diverse--we read about the heartbreaking fandom of porn addicts, about grammar wars and talk radio, about 9/11, and about everything we could have ever wondered about life on a John McCain media bus in 2004--and so it's no wonder that everywhere I turn there seems to be a connection waiting to happen.

And yet despite the fact that Wallace seems to throw himself into such a variety of scenarios, the book is cohesive in its tone (Wallace is always there with his narrative honesty, quirky stylistic flourishes, and long train of footnotes) and its themes: this almost feels like one big essay on politics and the contradictions of the human spirit. Wallace is wicked smart and wicked thorough, and this means that we both learn the precise details and big-picture ideas in way that eventually seems to connect all the dots, in a way that makes those synapses fire and keep firing long after the book has gone the way of those Central Market lobsters, down the hatch and out the backdoor.

Reading David Wallace inspires, in equal measure, the low level serenity of an Adderall buzz and the psychological unraveling of a manic bipolar episode. The essays in this collection stem from comically unreadable and almost appallingly `dense' (the one on modern grammar usage which is ostensibly a review of a dictionary but digresses enough times to make someone like Pynchon roll his eyes with a flabbergasted sigh) to almost shockingly intimate (the one about 9/11 cryptically referred to as `The Horror' in which your humble narrator betrays himself as not only a `serious' church-goer but a friend to old ladies everywhere and describes the hysteria of falling bodies with such spooky clarity you wonder how this can be same guy who spends oh a good twenty+ staggeringly dull pages describing the decor of a porno awards show which should, in fact, be really, really interesting). It is worth noting that the porno essay (while of course a little inflated at 50 pgs (the basic problem with a lot (but not all, natch) of these frequently meandering essays) has a few merciless humdingers, like the section in which intrepid David (referring to himself ad naseum as yr. corresp.) spends time with infamous sleaze-titan Max Hardcore and comments on his B-girls whose dichotomy of personal affectation--ie: wishing to raise a puppy with 14-yr old esque longing vs. sporting quite proudly (?) deflating/inflatable breasts--is a perfect, spot on summation of just how depraved and confusing the adult entertainment industry can be. The modern language essay had some great lines too, of course, and as a SNOOT myself, I did appreciate a few of the more heady and relentlessly erudite passages (particularly all that rigamarole about the teen pot smoker trying to articulate his own sense of linguistic understanding vs. that of society at large). Tonally, the book manages to stay pretty consistently funny and reassuring and Wallace posits a lot of heavy philosophical questions, not least of which comes from the eponymous essay wherein the author wonders if it is an okay idea to boil alive a sentient creature for our own gustatory pleasure. The descriptions of the lobster clinging and clawing in the pot alone are worth the admission price. And who knew that these funky crustaceans were once thought to a form of `cruel and unusual' punishment when fed to prisoners more than once a month or whatever? Weird. The short version is that if you dig Wallace's style and don't mind wading through the seemingly endless (and vaguely narcissistic) morass of footnotes compounded by footnotes and interpolations and the whole bit (don't get me started on the final essay `Host' which is...well...you'll see), you will find a lot to love here. Just try not to get too snooty about it.

Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays is a non-fiction book by the late, acclaimed journalist and novelist David Foster Wallace. I first heard of DFW on a recent NPR interview, and, like many NPR stories, I found his life fascinating. Then a good friend of mine was talking about him and it reminded me of the interview, and soon after he loaned me a few DFW books. Wallace was a highly intelligent man with an enormous vocabulary and an unusual-but-enthralling writing style. He is widely renown for his command of language and syntax, and it's nearly impossible to read his writing without a dictionary. This is the first book of his I've read. The essays are reviewed in the order in which I read them.

"Consider the Lobster" was written for Gourmet magazine in 2004. Wallace took a trip up to the Maine Lobster Festival and was hired to write about his experiences there. He goes in to great detail about lobster cooking, how there's a huge boiler that can cook a hundred lobsters at a time. He talks about how smelly the MLF is, how hot the weather was, and how long the lines were. Then he discusses lobster biology in great detail and eventually delves into the heart of the article: do lobsters feel pain when they're being boiled alive? The piece was quite interesting, both objectively and subjectively. Wallace articulates the arguments for and against in his normal style, but he throws in his genuine confusion about the subject as well. He explains that he has certain animals he likes to eat and that he just prefers not to think about what they have to go through in order for us to eat them, to which he then muses on our minds ignoring these ugly truths. By the end of the article, Wallace has made no clear choice about lobsters and whether or not they feel, and neither had I. I just wonder how Gourmet felt about this piece?

In "Up, Simba," Wallace was hired as a pencil for the famously liberal Rolling Stone to write about one of the 2000 Presidential candidates. Wallace was put with Sen. John McCain. The piece is long (nearly 80 pages) and sometimes trying, but the overall quality of the essay was excellent. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be on the campaign trail, not the Hollywood-style glitzy trail, but the Real-World-lots-of-downtime-bored-out-of-your-mind-extremely-hectic trail, then you'll love "Up, Simba." The piece doesn't really get deep into politics, but instead muses on the authenticity of McCain and various other politicians. Wallace is constantly torn between whether or not McCain is genuine in his concern, or, letting his cynic take over, the man is just putting out an image. The article was revealing and interesting and slightly boring all at the same time, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. By the end, as with "Consider the Lobster," Wallace has made no choice on McCain's genuineness. For me, the cynic was silent and I dared to believe.

"How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" is a short review of tennis star Tracy Austin's autobiography. It was written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Wallace played competitive juniors tennis when he was younger and he decided to read and review the famous starlet's book. He basically said it was rubbish, horribly written, badly edited, and offered little-to-no real insight on Austin. He then goes on to muse on our [American people's, not mine:] fascination with celebrities and why we want to read about their lives, especially athletes. This piece was quite thought-provoking, and its brevity makes it much easier to read in one sitting.

"Big Red Son," written for Premiere magazine, is Wallace's account of the AVN Awards, which is basically like the Academy Awards for adult videos. Reading this piece was kind of like staring at a train wreck. I was repulsed a few times, but equally intrigued. Largely, while Wallace does cover the adult video industry, he goes into inane details about certain performers or directors/producers lives outside the screen, and this is possibly even more terrifying than the sex. The lack of humanity in many of the people is frightening. The vain "look at me and laud me" attitudes was loathsome. And the apathetic views of some directors (e.g. Max Hardcore), not caring how humiliating a situation will be for a "starlet," was downright sickening. Wallace talks about the awkwardness of the situation, standing in the bathroom between two male performers, silently obeying male-urinal etiquette. He muses how odd it is to be behind a woman in the buffet line that he's seen up close and personal. He talks about how cheap and foreign everything is, from the awards show itself to the people there. By the end of "Big Red Son," it's easy to see Wallace's disgust with the business and I shared his sentiments. It's just mind blowing how crude some people can be. Still, this essay is worth the read, if only to somewhat try and understand a group of people you'll never be able to really understand.

"Authority and American Usage" is a massive, exhausting book review of Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. I read about a third of this piece before I abandoned it. I just really didn't care much about the finer points of American usage, and there were way too many words I didn't understand. Hardcore English fans may enjoy this, but I couldn't do it.

"The View from Mrs. Thompson's" recounts Wallace's experience with 9/11 and the following days. I really liked this piece a lot, the way he mused and questioned the Horror. Possibly my favorite short essay in the collection.

"Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" was particularly interesting because I like Dostoevsky (though as of writing this I've not read any of his books) and I wanted to read Wallace's thoughts of the man. This piece is actually a review of Joseph Frank's books on Dostoevsky, arguing that Frank's works are unique and great. Throughout this piece Wallace inserts random philosophical musings, asking deep questions that at times make you stop and think seriously about things. I enjoyed this essay quite a bit, and recommend it if only for the philosophy.

The three remaining essays I did not read. I had no interest in the odd way "Host" was arranged on the page, nor did I care about the subject. Similarly, I never liked Kafka and had no desire to read Wallace's views on him, and the same goes for the review of John Updike work.

All in all, Consider the Lobster was a great read. It falls into a genre I never read, and the break from the norm was fun. I felt like I was slowly learning a bit about Wallace's life with each piece I read. Wallace's cynicism gets heavy throughout some works, and it's really no surprise to learn that the man eventually killed himself. Still, his writing is top-notch, his essays are enjoyable, and his musings mix humor with seriousness. Everyone should read a few DFW essays in their life, and Consider the Lobster is a great place to start.

An erudite dilettante like writer David Foster Wallace would likely have me running away from him at a cocktail party, but on paper, his stream-of-consciousness curiosity and ribald sense of humor meld nicely into ten genuinely entertaining essays that sift through the minutiae of life which others would ignore and somehow bring meaning to all of what he observes. The topics vary greatly and have little to do with one another until you begin to realize they reflect one man's sensibilities and passions. Through the lucid expression of his seemingly bottomless curiosity, Wallace is able to achieve a sense of intimacy and a depth of honesty that allows him to get away with the omnibus nature of this book.

The all-over-the-map title essay where he provides a discourse on lobsters is a vivid illustration of Wallace's idiosyncrasies and a good litmus test of whether one has the patience to follow his belligerently fact-filled mind. First viewed as low-class food before the Industrial Revolution, lobsters were eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. So venal was the perceived taste that in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. Then he shifts dramatically to talk about the pain response when lobsters are boiled, animal cruelty issues overall, the role of PETA, the de-beaking of chickens and how we have come about to eat other animals through euphemisms for edible mammals ("beef", "pork"). What starts out as an amusing essay on lobsters turns into a philosophical discussion on why other animals have to suffer to satisfy our own taste buds.

Such is Wallace's breadth of knowledge and investigative prowess that he can run the gamut on topics as diverse as Kafka; the pornography industry; the lack of honest disclosure in former tennis player Tracy Austin's ghost-written autobiography; John Updike; Bryan Garner's grammar primer, "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage"; a five-book life of Dostoyevsky; the state of contemporary talk radio; and John McCain's appeal across party lines during the 2000 election. His take-no-prisoners approach paints a picture of Updike that may rile his fans as Wallace explores the prolific author within the context of his contemporaries and mercilessly demonstrates the ongoing limitations of Updike's style in his depiction of his characters. On the other hand, Wallace focuses on the comedic side of Kafka, as Wallace feels the often bleak, surrealist author displays a centrifugal irony in his work, focused on the horrific struggle to establish a human self wherein humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

My favorite essays relate to Garner's grammar book and McCain's appeal. In the former, Wallace explores territory that has preoccupied Lynne Truss in her popular book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", but he takes the topic several steps further into what he calls the "seamy underbelly", showing how current rules around grammar are tied up in the social issues defining our country now. It's a fascinating perspective that Truss did not really cover. The McCain essay is also quite enlightening. Having just read McCain's book, "Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember", I have a better sense of why McCain has a broader appeal than our current President, even though he has many of the same reactionary positions. Wallace incisively shows how McCain gets to the core of political issues versus others more preoccupied with market-tested posturing. Be forewarned that Wallace does tend to get pedantic at times and meticulous in sourcing his information with even footnotes having footnotes. Regardless, it's the monomaniacal researcher that makes Wallace such an interesting fellow, and it's his sharp writing style that makes you want to pay attention to him. Highly recommended.

This really is a fantastic collection, I'm kicking myself now for not having gotten into Wallace's stuff sooner. These pieces somehow manage that oddest of qualities in modern non-fiction writing: being in earnest. Wallace seems interested in offering us serious examinations of things that we would rather dismiss as irrelevent or beneath us (I mean the Maine lobster festival?). Granted many writers do that these days, but Wallace is one of the first I've come across who seems to regard this as not just some delightful novelty, but as a sober desire to genuinely understand the bizarre hodgepodges that make up contemporary life. For the curious at heart.

I'm a big fan of Wallace's insane 1000-page tome, Infinite Jest, although I've never been able to convince anyone else to read it -- even lent it to a friend who doesn't have a television to ensure it'd be read. The thing about Infinite Jest that might about kill ya (aside from the fact that it's so fanciful that it should be called fiction fiction) is the fact that half the story is footnotes and endnotes and you're constantly losing your place, forgetting where you were, and being taken on a tangent to a tangent that you're not convinced will ever return. Wallace continues this style, even experimenting with a not-seen-before graphical depiction of footnotes in "Host" that involves boxes and arrows to more-or-less contain the notes and direct your attention. The stories are good, and funny, although not laugh-out-loud so. The reviews of Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky's biographies are a hoot; completely over the top, and I'm not sure Wallace even read Frank's books. Same goes for his review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (which he insists on calling ADMAU) -- it's not so much a review as an excuse for Wallace to stand on his bully pulpit and make all sorts of crazy rants about language. The story called Consider the Lobster is the most accessible, probably the best story of the lot, and has the fewest doubly-redirected footnotes. Start with that one if you've not read Wallace before and work your way up to Infinite Jest.

Absolutely in love with David Foster Wallace. Picked up this collection of essays on a whim after seeing him listed alongside Montaigne and Sam Johnson and all the other Greatest Essayists of All Time, and thinking it was a mistake, or maybe that he made it into the list because Millenials have terrible taste (sorry), I was surprised to find the best and most flowing modern prose infused with some of the deepest, most moving insights on the most unlikely of subjects. Whether talking about a porn convention or a lobster festival or reviewing a dictionary or talking about tennis, Wallace touches upon something much grander (and oftentimes funnier) than you could have ever imagined. A great soul, and (because of his recent suicide) a tragic loss for anyone who enjoys literary talent of the highest and most humane level.

This is the first book by David Foster Wallace that I've ever read, and I've already ordered my next from the store. These essays are, by turns, insightful and hilarious. Wallace may be the best working essayist out there.

"The Big Red Son" is perhaps the best essay in the piece. It is the definitive look at the Adult Entertainment Industry. Wallace attends the AVN awards in Vegas. The result is just sad - especially when we get a good look at former child star, Scotty Schwartz.

"Authority and American Usage" should be required reading in every Freshman Composition class. I should know - I teach one.

"Consider the Lobster" takes a serious look at a question that everyone's asked at least once in his life: "Isn't it barbaric to throw a living thing into a pot of boiling water?"

The other essays are good as well. "Up, Simba" is a look at the John McCain Presidential Campaign. Part of the problem is that the topic is a little outdated for such a long piece, but - if you hate George Bush - you'll have more reason to after reading it.

Wallace's "gimmick" is extensive footnoting. The footnotes sometimes take up more room than the actual essay. The only time this bothered me was in the essay, "Host." That piece had such an intricate series of footnotes it looked like a schematic. It didn't help matters that most of the footnotes in that piece weren't very interesting - I just skipped them.

I would suggest, dear reader, that when considering Consider the Lobster, that you consider it in the same light as David Foster Wallace's collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Use that book as your frame of reference for style and content and you can place this collection firmly into the category of "typical" DFW. That being said, if you thoroughly enjoyed A Supposedly Fun Thing... then you'll likely thoroughly enjoy this one as well; by that same coin, if you're on the fence, you're unlikely to be won over; and if you dislike DFW (If you truly and I mean honestly and passionately dislike DFW, well then I suggest some rigorous therapeutic interventions) then this collection will probably do you no favors.

So in this reviewer's opinion: Consider the Lobster is more of the same. But that's a good thing.More...

One thing that CtL has over ASFTINDA is that it reads like an essayist's equivalent to a DJ's mixtape. While the essays individually are more than capable of standing on their own (e.g., apart from each other; i.e., in their original printings) they are arranged in such a creative way here that they build upon each other. The essays are vaguely self-referential, perhaps purposefully so; "jokes" from a given essay may rely heavily on you properly "getting" and then retaining the thesis of a preceding essay. I submit as an example: "Authority and American Usage" contains several sections that are slightly humorous in their own respect but can only be truly appreciated as bracingly so when you recall Wallace's thesis on Franz Kafka's humor from the prior article and the accompanying explication of said humor and why it is thoroughly pointless to try and explain any joke anywhere, let alone Kafka's absurdly dark and probably pathological comedy (which is totally drained of its humor when you try to offer any kind of explanation. I offer as further evidence for this that (after a protracted bout of laughing) I read aloud (to A.) a passage from "Authority and American Usage" and how it's humor is underscored by the thesis of the Kafka essay to which A. offered scarcely an acknowledging chortle). In this way, CtL may be Wallace's finest collection to date; the interleaving of the essays, their strength when taken as a whole, an obscurely surreal recursion. It's really all quite expertly done.

Perhaps the highlight of this collection is the maturity that Wallace is showing. Previous collections have his tone and style coming off as a bit of an effete intellectual, a nerdy-but-hip smartest-kid-in-class tone that is simultaneously masterfully humorous and maddening. Like maybe he's just trying to make you feel dumb but then again maybe it's thesaurial sleight-of-hand to play into some particular joke. Which is not at all to suggest that he has discarded this completely. But maybe like he's toned it down a bit (maybe?)? His signature style is definitely still there but he seems to have grown into it, it's a better fit. Whereas before it may have felt borderline confrontational (see above), it comes across now as disarming. For example, in the midst of "Authority and American Usage", Wallace comes across (on the one hand) vaguely condescending of SNOOTs (just read the essay...) and then on the other hand admits to being one; and then he takes a deeper dig on SNOOTs by eviscerating their essays and articles and other writings (e.g., the heavy-handed and jargon-laden "worst ever" publications of Comparative Lit profs) by using the very same over-the-top vocabulary to get to that point (I mean seriously: do you know anyone to drop "solecistic" in casual conversation?). The whole routine can be a little jaw-clenched maddening but is for those same reasons endearing and worthwhile.

It is also seems worth mentioning that Wallace masterfully frames pretty grand subject matter in all kinds of tangential and frankly genius-like-a-mad-scientist ways that it's formidable and a bit frightening. Example: Wallace uses "Authority and American Usage" as a vehicle to discuss linguistic politics and the critical role of socialization, language learning, and regional dialects on individual growth and development (Compare/contrast with similar arguments posited in Freakonomics). Example: Wallace uses his coverage of McCain2000 in "Up, Simba!" to discuss the political brokerage through media outlets and the bizarre power dynamics at work between journalists, politicians, and their handlers (let it also be known that this becomes painfully apparent when the essay's title appears in the text; it's a real head-slapping moment with a kind of chilling aftershock). Example: how Wallace goes to work on the ethics of food in "Consider the Lobster", working through the logic rather elegantly and then stupefyingly relinquishing it all with the atavistic admission that that simply isn't enough to tear you away from the desire to enjoy something delicious. In light of all this, it's no wonder an aspiring author Such As continues to find himself enthralled and intimidated by this literary Cronus.

Parting shots? I have two: the first regarding my "four of five" rating and the second a mere sidebar.

First: though the tone in CtL shows a refreshing maturity and welcome evolution, and though every essay is engaging and timely and brilliant, there also seem to be moments of tedium. Perhaps this is expected and unavoidable. But an essay on a book on the life and times of Dostoevsky (e.g.) can disappoint. Abandoning the F.N. format for a House of Leaves-esque series of drawn boxes is more distracting than textually informing (even if the essay's content is exhilarating and terrifying). And maybe it's just me but "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" seemed (via the text) a parody of itself as much as it was a parody and/or review of the book in question.

Second: while I don't believe that these kinds of things, should matter, I'm also of the opinion that Wallace should have fired the photographer. Or perhaps chosen a better photo from that particular shoot. I realize that folks may want their book jacket photos to be relatively current, and I realize that our bodies change over time, and all of that is fine; but I also wonder if his publisher could have perhaps insisted that they find a photo that did NOT make him look like a squinty-eyed and slightly slumped Jeffrey Lebowski. Seriously sir, that's your credibility at stake here.

Yes, this is good stuff. While not that impressed -- yet -- with Wallace as a novelist, his essays/articles here reveal the heart of a real, thoughtful, sensible human being. His style is so accessible, so regular and so American, he makes Keillor look crotchety and makes Hitchens seem like an anal dweeb. Yes the essay on language is worth the price alone (it's the most important piece of its kind since Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"), but so is the essay on lobsters, on porn, and on Dostoevsky. My only problem with "Host" -- it's excellent, perceptive writing -- is that the "hyperlink" stuff is gimmicky (like Cormac McCarthy's not using punctuation or capitalization - a cheap literary trick) and all the boxed entries could simply be footnotes.
Nevertheless, this is good reading, excellent reading. I'll look for Wallace's next novel and hope it's better then Infinite Jest, which out-Pynchoned Pynchon.

Really, it isn't that I'm scoring the book 4 stars. I'm rating the first two essays with 2 stars for failing to intrigue me and I am rating the rest of the essays somewhere between 5 and 6 stars, despite the rating system's prohibition on rating higher than 5 stars.

Wallace in no way waivers in his unprecedented and uncanny ability to command the English language and formalize engaging and convincing rhetoric. Additionally, the breadth of his knowledge staggers, but not once at the cost of thoroughly engaging the reader and providing at least mild entertainment.

Stupid intro that went on and on about porno awards. Had no idea this book was such trash. Sorry I didn't find this outuntil it was too late to return it. One star rating is inaccurate. Should be 0 stars.

I had read hundreds, maybe thousands, of words about David Foster Wallace before I read a single word he had written. The words I read spoke of genius, digressions, footnotes and the tragic suicide which released him from the depression from which he suffered most of his life. An acquaintance recommended "Consider the Lobster" as the most representative collection of his work. The essays are varied and I would agree represent well his genius, his notable ability to digress from the topic at hand and his fondness for footnotes. What was missing was any insight into the real DFW - the DFW who chose not to sustain his own life. Surely this is the most interesting and important thing that he could have written. I understand his private papers are now at the University of Texas. Hopefully, scholars will find his words on the missing DFW in those papers. Until those arrive, read the words in this book - they are a joy.

DFW does an excellent job presenting 4 of his best essays in Consider the Lobster on this set. Although the method of presenting Wallace's notoriously long footnotes on audio took some getting used to, his narration was very enjoyable.

'The Big Red Son' stands out as Wallace's strongest essay in this collection. It was equally parts sad, hilarious and at times outright disturbing. Wallace's narration felt more like storytelling, rather than a narrator reading a book.

His essay on Tracy Austin's 'tell all' autobiography was presented well...althouh, at times I felt sorry for Austin as Wallace read some of her more airheaded quotes.

The title essay definitely made me 'consider the lobster', as Wallace spoke of the darker side of Maine's lobster industry.

Overall, the audiobook was outstanding. Although, being an abridged edition, I felt cheated. I'd definitely pay to hear some more of Wallace's essays in the audiobook format.

I read the paperback, and gave it as a gift in kindle form. Assuming that the content did not change in its transfer to kindle (the audio version contained only four of his essays from the book and the online description was misleading) I highly recommend this collection of David Foster Wallace essays. His eclectic variety of subject matters and various observations about them, are nothing short of brilliant. Hilarious, profound, enlightening. A genius of a writer, a genius period! who was taken from us way too soon.

Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly intelligent.

The pieces in "Consider the Lobster" have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper's, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike's `Toward the end of Time', on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka's humor, and on the `breathtakingly insipid autobiography' of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace's (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are:

Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas.
Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine).
Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of "Live and Local" on Southern California's KFI.
Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone).
Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies.

Here's what I like about David Foster Wallace's writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing - it's also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell `footnote'?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force - when it first appeared in Harper's, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner's book (which is just as good as DFW promised).

How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows?

"Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale?

....... (several other rhetorical questions) ......

Did you know that US lexicography even *had* a seamy underbelly?"

And which later contains sentences such as:
"Teachers who do this are dumb."
"This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections."
and - my personal favorite -
"This is so stupid it practically drools."

Not everyone will give this collection 5 stars, but I do.

Consider the Lobster is very much in the vein of DFW's 90s essay collection 'A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again'. The style is perhaps a little tighter, a little more mature, a little wiser. The effect just as pyrotechnic. Once again DFW turns his vast and wide 'ranging intelligence to tackle the gauntlet Philip Roth laid down a few years ago, namely, the 'American Beserk', and how to tackle it. Many older writers have given up, the sheer hubris and purposeless of so much modern US activity way beyond their comprehension and radar. DFW, having grown up with the twin saturating forces of TV and marketing, probably goes further than any other contemporary writer (well, maybe along with Delillo), in attempting to grapple with this mightiest of themes.

So, we have in this collection 'Big Red Son', an essay on the porn industry which adopts a similar tack to an essay I recently read by English writer Martin Amis which uses irony to undermine the whole industry - i.e., don't adopt the feminist approach of saying how disgusting and degrading it is, just point out how ridiculous it is i.e. 'Ms Jasmin St Claire's cult celebrity status stems from her having broken the "World Gang Bang Record" by taking on 300 men in a row in Amazing Pictures' 1996 World's Biggest Gang Bang 2.' DFW may criticize what he considers to be the prevailing form of commentary in savvy American life, but boy does he use that device. This book positively drips with irony.
Certainly the End of Something or Other is a short piece, a book review on John Updike's recent novel 'Toward the End of Time' which both acknowledges what a great stylist Updike is, and just how much of a GMN (great male narcissist) he is. DFW and Updike are very different beasts in the American literary firmament.

What else?: a short, fairly uncompelling piece on humour in Kafka; an essay on Authority and American usage - a 20,000 word dictionary review which is way funnier and more interesting than you would expect (with a cracking riff on DFW's own attempts to teach standard white English to his black students).

The View from Mrs Thompson's is DFW's September 11 piece, an original take on those morbid events from his original observation point in the Midwest (as an antidote to all those East Coast literary views). It is one of those pieces that spends its whole time setting up the pieces, like the game Mousetrap, before delivering a thudding whoompf in the final sentence.

How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart is a piece that takes in tennis and celebrity sports biographies - two passions of DFW. He comes to the conclusion that the banality and cliche ridden personality of elite sports stars is not only accessory but fundamentally necessary to their talent.

Up, Simba is a long political piece covering the vicious 2000 Bush v McCain Republican primaries. This is competent, and revealing to those not familiar with US political campaigns, but I felt it was too jaded and never quite took off. Far better is the political content of 'Host', the final essay, with its original sub folders for footnotes, which pins down the right wing paradigms of John Ziegler and his WHAS radio station.

If this isn't enough, a couple of thought provokers on whether lobsters feel pain when steamed alive in the eponymous title essay, and a foray into 19th Century Russian classics with a review of Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky biographies.

All in all a witty, brain fuelled tour round modern America, and some of its more interesting and original sideshows. More essays soon please DFW.

Wallace is often at his best in essay form and his newest collection is no exception.

There's some great stuff here: including "Big Red Son," an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the Adult Video Awards; "Authority and American Usage," which starts as a review of a new dictionary and gradually devolves into not only a comparison between prescriptivist and descriptivist thinking, but an indictment of his own teaching style; "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," in which DFW watches the second plane crash into The World Trade Center on television from the safety of his neighbor's kitchen; and the title essay, where DFW gets too tied up in the realization that The Maine Lobster Festival amounts to not much more than asking a million people to stand around and watch as one million lobsters are boiled alive to actually write about whether the festival is fun or not.

The book has it's problems, obviously. There's a Dostoevsky piece that left me bored and cold. And the footnotes, which don't tend to bother me usually, are quite annoying in "Host" (instead of being at the foot of the page, they're included in little boxes that break up the text--pretty to look at, but difficult to read). But there is something to enjoy or learn in almost all of this collection's entries.

For me, though, no matter how good or bad the rest of the book is, the book itself gets four stars solely for the inclusion of "Up, Simba." This essay, originally an e-book, concerning eight day's on the campaign trail with Senator John McCain back in 2000, is one of the most thought-provoking and beautiful pieces of writing that DFW has ever produced.

...he'd be of another species...Great, thrilling and hugely fun to read...I've never been real big on his fiction. While sharing many of the virtues of this essay collection, it just never quite took off, for me...but this stuff...this stuff rocks. The format suits him perfectly, and you find yourself flipping through the pages like you would some airport mystery potboiler. Let me not gloss over, either, how funny this guy is. You will, as they say, laugh out loud, and frequently...

I love audiobooks. I don't understand why it is so hard to make an audiobook's chapters match with the books chapters. I don't understand why an audiobook's description can't seen to ever document the stories and chapters that are contained in the audiobook. Why is this so hard??

I had read Consider the Lobster about a year ago, and started an Audible account so I snagged the audiobook for free. Getting to hear DFW read some of his work was thrilling and well worth the free price.

I'm about the same age as Wallace, too old for the Gen-X category to which he has often been consigned as one of its infinite jesters, and too young for being a full-fledged baby-boomer, seeing that we came of age in the 70s and at the tail end of that. This ability to tilt between the boomer's desire for a utopian and liberated zone of unrestricted freedom and the anomie of the slacker's suspicion in an era where all politicians are tainted by the ghosts of Watergate and the relentless marketing of alt-culture's corporatized irony and self-referential smugness: here Wallace thrives. I have never read his fiction, and admired his journalism mostly at a distance. But, my curiosity got the better of me. His early essays seemed too jejune. Yes, he himself delights in loops of references and doggedly pursues his subjects with rueful sardonicism, but he has grown as a writer and a human being since his earlier journalism collected in 'A Supposedly Fun Thing...' into a more compassionate witness, a more disciplined thinker. While these essays tire you out if read too many at a sitting-- the effort to follow the notes in 'Host' being the worst-case scenario of his Stern-like (Tristram more than Howard I think?) passion for footnotes, asides, and marginalia-- they do inspire self-examination.

I would not have expected to sum up these essays with the term 'moral clarity,' but this is precisely the ideal that Wallace seeks amidst adult porn, Kafka's very un-American humor, prescriptive rules rather than only descriptive analysis of American Standard White English usage, or the reactions his midwestern neighbors have as they watch Dan Rather the morning of 9/11/01. He stops and notes, if in passing, a small detail in each essay that shows, despite the shenanigans and digressions, that he possesses intelligence and compassion. He reminds me of Tom Wolfe in that he is not so much a satirist as a moralist, in that he expects people he observes to live up to their code, and not to lie to themselves when they recognize a glimpse of truth within our cynically commodified market-driven celebrity-crazed dumbed-down culture.

For instance, in the porn article, he notes a retired cop's admiration for adult videos: they show, in the unguarded moments when the purported nasty bad girl experiences unfeigned pleasure as shown by a moment of ecstatic happiness on camera as she reaches orgasm, a window into our vulnerable humanity that mainstream actors can never equal. An insipid, ghostwritten autobiography of Tracy Austin moves former tennis sub-star Wallace to muse about its laconic dullness: could this not represent the inner drive, the absolute non-verbal total state of concentration that the superstar athlete can enter and so triumph over their nervous opponent? John Updike's turgid 'Toward the End of Time' contrasts its narcissism with Wallace's refutation of its 'bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants to is a cure for human despair.' Kafka's ambivalent wit resists reduction even as it can be summed up in the ultimate joke: 'the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.'

[A brief aside: in the American usage essay, Wallace correctly castigates theory-addled academics, but his footnote only gives the newspaper secondary citation for a source that looks-- lots of "carceral" blather-- to be another Marxian jeremiad from (perhaps an acolyte of?) Angeleno apocalyptic Mike Davis; Wallace needed to credit the primary author of this excerpt of the worst scholarly boilerplate award circa 2003.]

His long investigation into American usage leads Wallace into a realization that the SNOOTs (his acronym) who obsess over proper standards reveal the lie that so many Americans are taught: contrary to our attitude of populist reverse snobbishness, conventions do matter after all. Despite our American 'we're all just folks' insistence that class does not count (in both the classroom and the economic applications), Wallace reminds us that, like it or not, we are judged by how (and if) we handle English in a somewhat competent fashion.

The news footage of 9/11 leads Wallace into an uncomfortable epiphany: those who fly the planes hate not the America of his gentle elderly female neighbors nearly as much as the macho, aggressive, self-aggrandizing America he and his fellow younger men represent. A trip with John McCain inspires an essay far too long, but which hammers away at the complacency that, contrary to rhetoric, the parties in power love to sustain and churn up: keep politics dull, sanctimonious, and so repulsive that voters will stay away in droves and all the incumbents will be all the more secure come election day. McCain, whose Vietnam torture Wallace describes movingly (and which I, contrary to his assumptions, knew nearly nothing about beyond the fact he was a POW for five years), drives Wallace into an impossible predicament. Is McCain calculated in his public persona or is he genuine, and where does one end and the other begin if one is an intelligent candidate in the public eye for months on end? On a lighter note, any writer who can link the Hanoi Hilton to the mundane torment more familiar to the rest of us as a chain motel deserves kudos. The essay is wearying in its detailed itineraries, but after a while you enter a Zen state akin to that of stupor on the campaign trail, which may be its sly intent.

The title essay similarly challenges moral assumptions held if not often examined by most Americans. If PETA is right that 'Being Boiled Hurts,' how does this pertain to boiling lobsters for our delectation? Why do we kill other creatures? How do we justify doing so? Can we question our habits without ending up equating rats with pigs with each other? Writing for Gourmet, 'the magazine of good living,' Wallace honestly scrutinizes the uncomfortable truths about the need that drives us to consume animal and fish and bird flesh-- that most of us every day when we eat likely choose not to consider. He does this without sounding preachy or pompous, and ends his essay just in time, I suppose, about this difficult subject.

Joseph Frank's studies of Dostoevsky are interpolated with Wallace's own précis of the philosophical quandaries his reading of D. conjures up. These, again, illustrate Wallace's growing sophistication in tackling the tough questions, the existential angst we feel, especially as we age. Wallace conveys the core of Dostoyevsky's thought. Wallace deftly draws us into the limning of our own circle of responsibility, where we find the sheer impossibility to separate our selfishness from our altruism, and laments our lack, in today's writers, of any serious successor to D's own 'morally passionate, passionately more fiction' that somehow manages to be realistic and convincingly human.

Finally, in the interminable if intermittently interesting 'Host,' among many other issues around the supposedly populist voices of AM talk radio, Wallace does raise relevant questions. Why do so many on the left lack the cohesion and the passion with which conservative pundits can express their ideas? Why do the chattering classes hold the flyover states in such contempt? In blurring moral and cultural critiques with political right-wing lobbying, how do talk-shows promote the status quo rather than truly upending an unjust status quo? And, how much do these pundits pander as corporate shills for all sorts of products pitched to play into their listener's fears, credulity, and loneliness? He also challenges us to imagine why, beyond the stereotypes, many listeners to such shows may well be right (no pun) in their judgement that-- as the first essay showed us with porn that itself seems to have no taboos left to its voracious market expansion except the (so far) off-limit snuff films-- America has drifted away from a moral center-- however hypocritical or distorted, standards did once hold sway-- into debauched cultural permissiveness.

Wallace wearies this reader, but he does make me think harder about such issues. He goads us by his presentation of the material, and irritates our complacent expectations of how passive readers should be. The author has done more work here than the usual journalist. It may look undisciplined, but it is carefully-- if rather too generously for our patience-- constructed. Wallace kicks out the chair from under us, and makes us scurry about his pages as if they scurried away from a Kafkaesque typesetter.

The book jacket inside cover blurb trumpets this book as funny, as if to assure the cowed reader that all the footnotes won't be too scary. Yet amidst the flash of the rather undisciplined form, the content does contain sustained depth. His jacket photo studiously expresses Wallace's wish-- as he says in the usage article-- to be able to blend incognito with the rural midwesterners of his childhood. He does strike the requisite grubby pose. But, as he admits, he also carries his parents' own elevated (and at times snobbish-- but in a good way!) expectations that we everyday people live up to our potential intellectually and ethically. I know this is not the same as "uproariously funny," but in the tradition of Tom Wolfe, Mencken, or Gore Vidal, Wallace combines his own stint in the ivory tower with long treks across the lands where lurk the rest of us, the great unwashed.

He admonishes us, himself included, to live up to what America and our own abundant resources allow us to profit from: the exertion of our minds for the betterment of our souls. Not a flag-waver, but nonetheless another prophet awakening us from our malaise. I wish the press promoters would have advertised this morality supporting Wallace's social criticism. Perhaps his own essays will draw more writers-- and better yet readers-- towards the serious examination of cultural and moral trends that Dostoevsky might have expected us to continue.

I more or less accidenally bought this book the night before it came out, just checking to see if it was available. Happenstance. I am totally pleased with this collection of essays. DFW seems to have found or worked with his 'god-shaped hole' and it shows in a freshly (some of these were done around 1996, allbeit updated or revised er edited probably a bit since) compassionate flavor to his prose. I was finishing the article on Authority and American Usage this afternoon and I realized for a second as I caught my breath in between his platinum clauses, how thoroughly engaging his writing style is. But its the compassion that's most noticable for me. I considered his past book's work pretentious yet incredibly smart - just kind of off-puttingly so. He comes off both smart and sensitive in this collection. The footnotes while naturally digressive, are almost 90% of the time entertaining and I laughed me arse off quite a bit in the last week while reading most this stuff (two essays to go).
RELEVANT AND HIGHLY RECCOMMENED FOR ALL PATIENT READING PEOPLE SEMI-INTERESTED IN CULTURE TODAY.
It's tough to try honestly to break this down without doing some sort of injustice to Consider The Lobster. The essays are worth a purchase (perhaps discounted though, its kind of pricey right now I confess).

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace wields a mighty literary voice. Although not easily accessible, this book's collection of essays is not to be missed. From an insider's view of McCain's campaign trail, to an eldritch perspective of the Boston Lobster Festival, Wallace presents the modern essay as high art.

I say it's not easily accessible because his range and precision with the English language is nearly unmatched in modern literature. You might as well purchase a pack of index cards when you buy this one because you'll either have to pause every other page to look up a word, or use the cards to write them down to look up later.

If you want to experience the highest tier of modern wordsmithing and essay crafting buy this one today.

Do you have any idea how many lobsters die each year in order to satisfy our culinary cravings? I've no idea, but after reading the essay `Consider the Lobster,' I have to say - too many.

Mr. Wallace approaches the issue from the stand point of our claw-y friends. Put yourself in the lobster's position - here you are, backtracking through the bottom of New England's coastline and suddenly you find yourself in the 100+ lbs pressure cooker of the annual Main Lobster Festival. You squirm, you fight, you die. But who are you? Are you just a tasty subject, one that is born to feed the gluttony of others, or are you more than that? Does anyone ever consider the fact that from a biological stand point, the lobster is a lot more of a complex system than the simple single cell organism of the ocean? If yes, then how come we avoid considering the consequences of the painful gastronomic preparations, that the Lobster MAY be feeling the unbearable pain of the boiling water?

There are other interesting essays in this book. Essays like the one on the debauchery of American porn industry, on the depravity of selected few who parade their sexuality not only on TV, but on the Las Vegas strip ( I personally found this essay too overwhelming for my literary tastes).

...and there are more.

Overall, I recommend this book to all intellectual seekers of contemporary issues that plague our nation. Here is a chance to satisfy your tastes for criticism, creativity and irony with this highly entertaining and skillfully constructed book.

- by Simon Cleveland

I've never read Wallace, mostly because his best known work ("Infinite Jest") is so long. But I tend to like writers that digress and use footnotes for asides, so I thought maybe this collection of ten essays would give me enough of a taste to know if I should check out his other stuff. Ranging in length from 7 to 80 pages, the essays all appeared previously (albeit often truncated) in various magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic, Gourmet, Rolling Stone, Premier, etc. They can be roughly categorized into three categories: brief review, personal piece, and long in-depth topical examination.

The brief reviews generally tend to take an item and use it as a staging area for discussing something more interesting than the given subject. For example, in "Certainly the End of Something or Other", Wallace uses his review of John Updike's novel Toward the End of Time to highlight the general narcissism and shallowness of writers such as Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. His 20-page review of Joseph Frank's biography of Dostoevsky is largely dedicated to making a larger point about literary criticism, and his 25-page review of tennis player Tracy Austin's autobiography is similarly dedicated to identifying the fundamental problem of sports memoirs. I have to admit that the essential point of the shortest piece, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness", eluded me.

The two more personal pieces are strikingly different, but in each one gets a vivid impression of Wallace working through his own feelings. In, "The View From Mrs. Thompson's", he uses 13 pages to recount his own September 11 experience in Bloomington, Indiana. As one reads of the mysterious sprouting of flags, Wallace's hunt for a flag of his own, and his spending the day watching the footage with old ladies who've never been to New York, his mounting alienation from his neighbors is fascinating. The titular story is ostensibly a standard travel piece on a Maine lobster festival, but rapidly evolves into a thoughtful meditation (with scientific research) on the ethics of preparing and eating lobster.

The four in-depth essays are the real stars of the book, in each Wallace gets deep into his material and wallows in it with intellectual vigor and above all, wit. In the 50-page "Big Red Son", he covers the porn Oscars and emerges with scenes and quotes so surreal they must be true. Over the course of the 50-page "Authority and American Usage", he takes a topic close to his heart as a writing instructor and provides a layman's overview of the Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist "usage wars". The underbelly of political campaigning is exposed in the 80-page "Up Simba", detailing his week on the John McCain's 2000 campaign trail -- the ultimate lesson is that if you want the most astute and nuanced political analysis, turn to the camera and sound techs, not the journos. Finally, the 70-page "Host" takes us into the world of talk radio, via a profile of an LA radio personality. All of these long pieces are wonderful (albeit in very different ways), as they allow Wallace's intellect the space to range free and elaborate.

Ultimately, it's not hard to see why Wallace is a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award-winner. His combination of smarts, thoughtfulness, self-awareness, wit, and ability to write killer prose simply can't be ignored. One does have to raise an eyebrow at his overuse of footnotes, however. While I'm a big fan of footnotes (yes, even in fiction), I find Wallace's use of footnotes within footnotes rather tiresome (not to mention tough on the eyes). In many instances, it seems like the material could have been handled much more elegantly within the text, or within a parenthetical. This is especially true of "Host", which is very nearly ruined by the attempt to use boxed text and arrows to replace footnotes. There's no textual reason for the method, and the experiment doesn't work at all, only serving to highlight the unnecessary divisions of information and reducing their navigability.

Although a few of the pieces failed to totally captivate me, and the overfootnoting grated (especially in it's final iteration), this is still a highly entertaining and enlightening book. Chuck Klosterman's essays are like potato chips -- yummy, hard to stop at just one, and not super filling. Wallace's are generally a full nutritious meal at your favorite restaurant.

Interesting topics and still a fun read after all these years, but I didn't find it as humorous as some of the other reviewers -- it lacked the pleasant surprise that I need for humor, so his footnotes became more like rants than a tickling of my brain.

Warning: If you abhor explanatory footnotes and asides, this book may not be for you.

Members of the American literati, the admitted audience for at least one essay in this collection, will already be familiar with DFW. For the rest of you: young (as in under 40), hip (as in long hair, swear words and breaching convention), and extremely smart and well read (as in English prof, and essay topics that include Kafka and Dostoevsky and prescriptive vs. descriptive American usage).

Somewhere in here there may be a reference to the fact that the aim of writing is to connect with the reader. DFW certainly did with me. I ripped through the collection over the weekend and enjoyed every one of the nine essays (having only come across one previously). Some of the reasons I liked them, in no particular order:

1) DFW points out, in reviewing Joseph Frank on Dostoevsky, that "Russian is notoriously hard to translate into English, and when you add to this the difficulty the archaisms of nineteenth-century literary language, Dostoevsky's prose/dialogue can often come offmannered and pleonastic and silly". I still don't know what pleonastic means, but have often felt that someone should make this point (as in "silly") about the prose/dialogue in some of the great Russian literature. The examples he goes on to give are hilarious, but I won't spoil it for you.

2) All the essays were to varying degrees funny. Big Red Son (on the 1998 Adult Video Awards) and Consider the Lobster (on the Maine Lobster Festival) standout in this regard.

3) The title essay was a review of the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine. DFW paints a disturbing picture of the MLF and raises for consideration whether boiling lobsters alive is a good thing. One suspects that this may not have been what the Gourmet editors had in mind. Kudos to them for publishing it anyway and to DFW, because knowing the intended audience makes the piece even funnier for the rest of us.

4) Somewhere in here DFW uses the verb "is" back to back and it seems right (wish I could find the sentence, but trust me). I personally never would have done this, but as the piece on American usage demonstrates, DFW is the expert, and if he's defying convention (I actually don't know for a fact that he is, but I rarely see "is" used back to back)you can't help but think his defiance is considered and ultimately right. It is this confidence DFW builds with me as a reader, rather than the actual consecutive use of "is" that I liked.

5) Sometimes directly, but mostly not, DFW points out the absurdity of the extreme "cross-firish" nature of American discourse. I find his sophisticated middle of the road tone compelling.

I could go on, but the bottom line is that I feel better for having read this collection of essays.

Downsides?

The asides get completely out of control in "Host". The essay is a dizzying presentation of arrows pointing to boxes, themselves containing arrows pointing to other boxes (and so on), which the reader has to follow all over the place to follow DFW's deliberately (one hopes) meandering train of thought. Some might not like this. Even I found it distracting, though not to the point of annoyance (as may have been intended).

Also, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" is the least funny of the nine works. Since it is "the text of a very quick speech" one presumes that it was intended to provoke at least an awkward giggle from the audience (and my guess is that it did, though in my opinion not deservedly). More to the point, Kafka's central joke, according to DFW is: "that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inserparable from that horrific struggle." Maybe it's just me, but... not laughing. Besides, if someone has to explain why it's funny (as DFW is here), my first intinct tells me it might not be.

These last two points were for balance. I strongly recommend this book.

This was my first reading of Wallace's work, and I thought it was phenomenal. Even the essays on topics like usage or Dostoevsky -- which I usually wouldn't touch -- were entertaining and insightful. But I'd warn that the ebook has some formatting issues (error messages in the text) and that the last essay is just missing.

Wallace, like Vidal, is a much better essayist than fiction writer. His fiction is mostly crap, although Mister Squishy is a classic. His essays however, always show intelligence, and more importantly, wit (what is wit but humor + intelligence?)

There are some five star essays here, a pretty uniformly excellent collection, save for the dictionary essay which was a exciting as reading one (a dictionary).

Mr. Wallace will become a superb* essayist** once he quits*** trying to prove he's the smartest kid in the class. Just like Johnny Ringo or Billy the Kid, there's always someone quicker.

And don't essays have at least as great (if not greater) impact than mere fiction?

* better than excellent

** one who writes essays

*** I could have said 'stops' but stop has been oversignified by red octagonal shaped metal objects, also know as signs, or 'stop signs'

In the past few years DFW's books have been kind of uneven, in my opinion. not so with this collection of essays. One is about him learning about Sept. 11th. One is him attending the Maine Lobster Festival (and as someone from Maine who has never gone, thinking it a tourist/logistical nightmare, well I guess it is). One is about how dicitonaries are created--not boring, but one of those essays you'd never imagine being interested in but afterwards it forms a part of your permanent knowledge base.

My only reason for 4 not 5 stars is some of the subject matter is kind of uninspired; i.e. the essays, all worthwhile, didn't have the fireworks effect his first collection did. However, the DFW style, knowledgable, with spot-on voabulary and diction (maybe it sounds simple to you but to me it makes for a truly aesthetic pleasure to find a word hittig the sweet spot in my brain), and also very honest.

A total pleasure...definitely buy this book.

Probably no contemporary writer has to meet higher expectations than David Foster Wallace. He's a genius. Ask anyone. In some cases, this works against him; as someone who survived reading Wallace's essay collection A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING..., I can testify that Mr. Wallace sometimes has aspirations that even his prodigious skills can't meet, and the results ain't pretty.

But in CONSIDER THE LOBSTER, he is hitting on almost all of his many cylinders. In fact, it is high praise indeed for me to report that on a flight to Phoenix, I was laughing so hard at this book's first essay (it's about a pornography awards show), I almost felt compelled to explain to my fellow passenger the source of my mirth.

I didn't. (I'm not insane.) But it was that good.

The rest of the topics examined by Wallace's gimlet eyes are, shall we say, wide-ranging, but aside from an enervating and lengthy examination of A DICTIONARY OF MODERN USAGE, Wallace lives up to his "genius" billing. I did grimace when I saw that the book contained a piece devoted to one of his pet topics, (namely tennis), but even this essay transcended its subject and was eminently worthwhile.

In short, I'm quite glad to have read this book. More, please.

This is a collection of essays ranging from the very short (6 pages) to very long (80 or so). They cover topics that include the adult film industry, presidential politics, classical literature and the intensity of pain felt by lobsters, among others. I found them to be a mixed bag, in quality as well as in subject matter.

Wallace writes with an erudite but casual tone. He's often wryly funny but not side-splittingly so, and is capable of the occasional deeply moving passage. The effect is similar to that of a smart blogger with an exceptional vocabulary. He sometimes dredges up very-rare words to make his points, but they are almost always necessary for the precision he aspires to, and he never comes off as an academic bore. Indeed, some of his better passages in this book decry the horror that is academic English.

When Wallace is good, he's very good. And he's best when he's writing about what he knows the best - literature and language. The essays on Dostoevsky and Kafka here are excellent, and inspired me to put them both on my list for re-reading. His take-down of John Updike is highly enjoyable even if not totally fair. And though the essay on English usage is terribly long and drags a bit in places, he nevertheless inspired me to care more about the subject.

Three of Wallace's quirks are worth caveats. One is his fetish for long, discursive footnotes, sometimes even extending to footnotes within footnotes. I dutifully read these for the first half of the book but stopped when I found that they didn't add appreciably to my enjoyment and indeed detracted from the narrative flow. The footnotes might be more understandable if Wallace were really committed to being as concise as he could be in the main text, but that brings us to the second quirk. . .

Wallace is far from concise. In fact, he's terribly wordy and often takes several times longer to make a point than is really necessary. His essay on Tracy Austin's reportedly cliché-ridden semi-autobiography basically comes down to Wallace's rumination that great athletes may write lousy, hackneyed books because they are possessed of a basic mental blankness -- and that this might be one of the characteristics enabling them to perform under pressure that more reflective people could not withstand. It's a quickly-grasped and not terribly profound point, and Wallace could have led up to it just as effectively in an essay of only a few pages.

The most troubling thing about Wallace, one realizes by the end of this collection, is that he is not a very insightful thinker, at least when he ventures out of his area of specialization. This is most evident when he is writing about politics, where his thinking is knee-jerkingly reflexive, and far from being reflective or self-aware. When following the McCain campaign, for example, he detects sinister right-wingism when McCain decries the proliferation of violent video games, leading Wallace to ruminate concernedly on how easy it is for precious First Amendment freedoms to be eroded. But Wallace wholeheartedly endorses McCain's campaign finance reform stance of promising to get the money out of politics (Wallace lists a bevy of contributory practices he thinks should be outlawed) - Wallace cites this as the prime evidence of McCain being a rare truth-teller among statesmen.

In reality there's no cheaper way for a politician to get good press than to bombastically decry the corrupting influence of money in politics. The press particularly loves it because it's always only other entities that would be restricted -- no one ever suggests that news organizations should be forbidden from spending as much as they want to publicize their own editorial opinions about public policy. If Wallace thought more seriously about the issue he'd be at least as concerned about the First Amendment implications of campaign finance restrictions as he is about McCain's utterances about violent video games, for indeed political dissent is the most precious of First Amendment rights. Life isn't so simple as to draw a bright line between money and speech in the way that Wallace would have it; many a dictator around the world would love to be able to assert that his people's freedoms to speak their dissenting opinions (or, more accurately, whisper them) are fully protected, it's just their capacity to combine their resources and to amplify their views that must be controlled in the name of keeping money out of politics. The practical reality is that circulating your views requires money, and it's inherently dangerous business for the government to be writing laws saying which organizations get to do it, how much, and which don't. Wallace reflects on none of this as he rather mindlessly parrots the applause lines designed with reporters like him in mind.

Perhaps a more telling example comes toward the end of the McCain essay, where Wallace describes Kennedy as the last true leader among presidents, mentioning Reagan only as a counter-example of someone who was not a real leader, but rather a salesman promoting an image of a leader. My own view is just the opposite; one needn't be more conservative than Wallace (as I admittedly am) to find plenty of evidence in the historical record that Kennedy when dealing with the Soviet Union had much a much closer eye on selling his political image than Reagan did. Agree or disagree with Reagan's foreign policy, one should at least acknowledge that he was a true believer in the importance of western democracy and capitalism outlasting authoritarian socialism, whereas many of Kennedy's stances were (by his own recorded words) adopted to mute domestic criticism. Now, Wallace is entitled to his own opinion and it need not agree with mine - if he simply stated his opinion on the matter, I'd have no problem with it. But what is troubling about Wallace is that he does not appear even to recognize that his is a subjective opinion: his judgments of Kenney and Reagan are offered as objective truths, not his own views. And as with his mentions of other public policy issues, his failure to grasp the basis of views other than his own greatly limits the range of his thinking. Over these pages he reveals himself to be an extremely superficial and somewhat reflexive analytical thinker, even as he is one with a tremendous literary flair.

I enjoyed this book in places but ultimately lost some patience with him. If one is going to write at length, there's an accompanying obligation to make the reader's journey worth it. But too often Wallace writes at length only to expand upon views that appear - not only in the political essays but in several of the others as well - to have been generated off the very top of his head. Though again, his essays on literature and language are quite worthwhile.

Wallace was universally praised as a great writer by many, to the point that his excerpts were used one writing class I attended. Despite the praise, i never got him. The strange structure of the sentences coupled with the fictional settings (I'm not a guy for science fiction, or any other forward thinking fiction for that matter. How many books have people written about a certain time period in the future that end up looking idiotic when read at that time? If the jetsons had any pretensions, could you watch the show in the year 2000 with a straight face? Not me. George Orwell could do it, though. Why? Because hes George Orwell.) were too much for me. A few years later I read an article touting his proficiency as a grammarian. Interested, I decided to check out his essays.

What a revelation they are. Wallace's prose walks the fine line between educated and pedantic but manages to seem genuine. This is a rare feat, and he makes an informed review of a dictionary as interesting as anyone could.

The dictionary review is the highlight of the book. In a way that is both insightful and comprehensive, Wallace exposes the finer points of word definitions while remaining somehow unpretentious. He voice comes through in his writing, as if he wants you to understand what you are reading.

Of course all of the essays are exceptionally well written, and there is enough here to satisfy a diverse body of readers. It's just an interesting book. A lot of worse ways to spend your time or money.

David when oh when are you going to write another novel?

I'm confident I'm not the only Foster-Wallace obsessive to wish his latest book were a novel rather than another book of essays, but nevertheless it is well worth reading. 'Big Red Son', while enjoyable, felt like DFW on auto-pilot, but I really enjoyed the title essay ('tho the same criticism could be made) and his (incredibly informative) essay on language usage.

Probably a book for the true believers rather than one which will drastically expand his audience.

I bought and read DFW's "Consider the Lobster" unseen and essentially unknown, on the strength of a review in the Chicago Tribune Sunday book section. It was an excerpt from the essay "Authority and American Usage" which grabbed me. The author asked, "Did you know American lexicography even HAD a seamy underbelly?" Well sir, when I read a sentence like that, something in my brain, maybe prostaglandins or endorphins or some other exotic brain chemicals discussed in the title essay take over, and I am left with a compelling, almost compulsive need to hear what this writer has to say. Full disclosure: I am not all that well read, and I had never heard of DFW before this, let alone read him.

OK. That's enough of that. Now, pleasantly enough, after puzzling my way through the essays on pornography, Kafka and Updike (1 outta 3 ain't bad, and more on the puzzlement below), I arrived at the essay which originally piqued (not "peaked", dear other reviewer) my interest. As it happens, I discovered Garner's dictionary quite by accident and quite by myself some 5 years ago, and was immediately -- and I do mean immediately, I am not the kind of person who sits down and reads dictionaries cover to cover -- struck by the clarity, moderation, and sheer common sense of Mr. Garner. I knew I was in possession of a classic treatise on the American language in the late stages of the 20th century, although I did not know exactly why. It just FELT right. I am forever indebted to Mr. Wallace for giving me the words to express what I felt way back in 1999 when I read Garner's preface, and felt like I had just made a new friend.

I should, perhaps, briefly explain how a person like myself, with little formal education (2 years of college), should come to be in possession of a usage dictionary -- ANY usage dictionary, let alone one as brilliant as this one -- and the answer is as simple as the media you, dear reader, are using to read these words: the internet. One of my first actions upon being released online was to head directly to the many chat rooms online, where I rapidly made the acquaintance of a pleasant young Ukranian woman who was trying to supplement her meager income by teaching English to other Ukranians, and who asked me for source materials. The relationship did not pan out, and I was left with several grammar and usage books which I find relatively worthless to me, but Garner's ADMAU made it all worthwhile.

And I feel I must take issue with the above reviewer who likened this particular work with Lynn Truss' "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves". I've read this book, I've belly-laughed my way through it, but, dear Sir or Madam, it's a book about punctuation, and Garner's dictionary is about usage, and if you need to have the difference explained, I can do so, but I'd gently advise you in the interim to refrain from posting any essays on Montaigne -- you gotta learn to crawl before you can run.

OK then -- now, onto the rest of the Lobster book, and my big question: Mr. Wallace, loyal readers of Mr. Wallace, blind fans of Mr. Wallace, Mr. Wallace's editors and publishers -- the footnotes -- and asides -- and the asides within footnotes -- Good GOD, people! Isn't there a better way? I've read some right good writers in my time, I think, Mencken, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Victor Klemperer (shameless plug for a deceased author, but his 2 volume diary of life under Nazi rule is fascinating and compelling), and never, NEVER, have I encountered so many distractions from the main text. Mr. Wallace, you're an excellent writer, far better, and far more learned than me, can't you find some way to incorporate all that stuff in the text? Most other writers do.

Just for laughs, I'm going to google some of your stuff, if it's still online, and see how many (if any) of the footnotes made it into print. Bottom line: this is a great read, Mr. Wallace has an excellent command of the language, the insatiable curiosity of a true journalist, the self-deprecating humor of a philosopher who's had it thrust upon him (nobody wears that mantle voluntarily in this century, do they?), and the down-home common sense of a midwestern boy from the baby-boom generation ( I got your back, Dave ).

[footnote: I've just re-read this review before posting it, and it's pretty awful, grammatically, I see I've switched tenses in the middle of paragraphs several times, and spent way too much time on Garner's dictionary without fully explaining that it's an integral chapter in the book, but you know what? It's 4:30 in the morning here, and I'm going to bed. "Consider the Lobster" is great, but it has too many footnotes] (end footnote)

I bought "Consider the Lobster" because I wanted a little taste of David Foster Wallace's style before deciding whether or not to invest the countless hours it would take to read his most famous monster of a novel "Infinite Jest". Wallace has sold me! Very smart writing on topics the average person doesn't necessarily stop to consider (as the title might imply). Just so you know, because it certainly surprised me, there are some very scholarly essays (there's a huge one about American Usage (language, grammar), for example, as well as one about Dostoyevsky... you get the idea) included in the anthology. If you have the discipline to get through them, though, they make some very interesting points and show the amazing range of what Wallace can do (which as far as I can tell, is just about anything.)

Just finished re-reading this, AFTER reading Hella Nation by Evan Wright Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut's WarAgainst the GAP, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America. Given Wright's introduction and "Life in Porn," AND DFW's thanks to Evan Wright at the end of his book, I'm thinking Harold Hecuba is Evan Wright. Re-reading DFW essays. Comment on Harold Hecuba, Evan Wright, link? Trying to make sense of what happened after DFW died, I read Wright quoted in some magazine about the great impact DFW had on him and all of us. Claremont has a course on DFW works only - found online. RIP.

At the beginning of one of the Roadrunner cartoons, as we proceed through the standard intro, Wile E. suddenly turns to camera: 'Allow me to introduce myself - Wile E. Coyote, Soooooooopergenius', and he presents his card, which says this. Unfortunately Wile E. peaked too early to qualify for the MacArthur Fellowship that was otherwise surely his by right.

There are two particularly revealing (perhaps 'tactically unsound' would be better) essays here.

The first is a slagging off of Updike as (together with Roth and Mailer) one of the 'Great Male Narcissists'. Takes one to know one. Lessee... There is the 'humble correspondent'/neo-Gibbonian (is that a word?) footnote schtick; there is the obsession with keeping it up - some of the essays here are the length of small books (let us not talk about Infinite Jest); there is the endless polysyllabic humour ('leptosomatic' for 'skinny' is only funny so many times) - as Gore Vidal said of Henry Miller, arcane words are put to use, often accurately.

The second is about Tracy Austin. The riff here is that overachieving sporting 'geniuses' are absent all introspection, and can't write, and that this is somehow mysterious and disconcerting (at least until he has written an essay about it) to an everyday, run of the mill, non-overachieving guy like David Foster Wallace. Duh - see previous paragraph.

All very well for while, but you wouldn't want to _live_ under Niagara.

If you Google the cross of "David Foster Wallace" and "Wile E. Coyote", you currently get fifty or so hits. The truth is out there.

Some of these essays didn't resonate with me (the Kafka essay was probably over my head), but the majority was sheer brilliance. I especially liked the update to Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' in the essay 'Authority and American Usage.'

Throughout, Wallace's thoughtfulness and sincerity shine.

Poignant, humorous and highly thought out writing in the distinct style of DFW. You don't have to side with him to be given food for thought in easily digested tidbits that's great to have on hand for light reading that doesn't leave you lacking depth.

This is excellent in its own right -- an intellectual smorgasbord (sp?) of issues in contemporary Americana (porn, talk radio, militant grammarians, etc.) -- but also, for fans of DFW's fiction, this is compulsory reading. There's some academic book that costs too much that posits DFW as the leader of the third wave of modernism -- following modernism & postmodernism -- and this book, along with his other collection of essays, helps explain why he might be.

I really like David Foster Wallace's fiction, but his non-fiction is the best book format material I have ever read. He is amazingly capable at evoking empathy, while occasionally stunning with his amazing command of the language and his in-depth research of his subjects.

I gave this one star, but I should update it to 2. The essay that attracted me first was on English usage, but it seemed daunting to tackle it. But once I got into it, that alone lifted my rating slightly.
The rest of my early review went like this and is somewhat the same (unless I revise it again!):
I had contemplated getting a Wallace book for a couple of years. I found my way there in part because of the store cross-reference suggestions and such ("people who bought this also bought THIS, etc.) and then I checked into it ... from what I read, his subject matter and writing style seemed up my alley.
Maybe this was the wrong book to take the plunge, so I won't paint all his work with the same brush. But I found myself paging through this book, trying to find a good starting point. The Updike chapter was mildly interesting, but otherwise .... zzzzzz.
I'm not wasting any more time trying with this one.

Though this reviewer rarely reads essay collections, this form of literature is both my favorite and my most detested format (corollary to the 50 page rule of why keep reading if it so bad, for essays a 20 page rule). When satirically amusing and filled with irony on "postmodern" life, nothing beats an essay such as classics like the "postmodern" "How to Cook Roast Pig" or "A Modest Proposal".

David Foster Wallace provides ten delightful articles on a variety of topics ranging from the relativity of pornography to generalizing the insipidness of sports autobiographies extracting from Tracy Austin's perfect tennis adventure (Bill and Ted for a set anyone). In Mr. Wallace's delightful way, if one wants to know whether a lobster feels pain while undergoing scalding water treatment, don't ask the cook, the lobsterman, or the zoologist; go to the source (not sauce): ask the lobster who obviously is not dancing their life away. Same goes to McCain's presidential bid lost during a failed debate with a fundamentalist demanding the senator turn no cheek insisting Christ condemned homosexuality. Though the asides can be difficult to follow with abbrev, they are fun to follow up on with their deeper explanations and Americanization of the English language through ibid. Readers will appreciate the deep look at "postmodern" American life as a fabulous INFINITE JEST.

Harriet Klausner

It's dangerous to pick a favorite from among the too few books David Foster Wallace published, but I have to go with "Consider the Lobster." Read it for the title essay and his thoughts about the use of language. Or read it because he writes the best footnotes ever. Either way, just read it.

As headline says, I enjoyed this more than DFW's fiction. I especially liked the first essay on the adult video business. Many amusing observations and his footnotes were often the best part. And the man loves his footnotes!!

i just finished reading this book. i only started reading dfw after reading about his death. after reading this book, i feel so sad that he's no longer here. his essays are extremely insightful, and he's such a brilliant writer and person. his probing curiosity about every aspect of the world around him is inspiring.

Succinctly written prose on a variety of subjects. Anyone that rates it poorly didn't do so because of the language or DFW's perception, but probably because they aren't willing to think about what he has to say. Amazing compilation of non-fiction, highly recommended.

My rating and review are specific to the abridged CD audio version. Be alert that it contains only four of the, I believe, ten essays of the text version - a fact I wish I had been aware of before making this my first daily commute audio book purchase.

I don't get all the 5 star, Wallace loving reviews here. This really isn't spectacular. There are some 5 star essays in the book (Big Red Son, Host). Also some one star ones that are just awful and tedious to read.

Who wants to read 75 pages about his views on language usage. Maybe if your a linguistics major. The tour diary from travelling with McCain loses it's drive halfway through.

Good, but not his best. Start w/ "Infinite Jest" and take it from there.

I was introduced to DFW by the classic essay "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again," but stupidly lost track of him until picking up "Lobster" on a whim a few weeks ago.

Let me say this first: even though DFW is a freak for the correct use of language, I love him because he can break all the pesky little rules we've all learned about clear writing (eg, no fifty-cent words, limit footnotes, limit adverbs, two simple sentences are better than one complex sentence, etc), and write vividly, clearly, engagingly, etc (see, he's already liberated my long-caged drive to adverbize.) Perhaps even better, he writes so that it feels we are in his head, and doesn't patronize his reader by tidying up messy internal disputes, which is damn refreshing.

Many of the essays are are similarly conceived (it somehow all seems to do with marketing to the least common denominator, and the way this marketing glosses over so much that is complex and difficult and important to think about, and the author's simulataneous fascination with and and revulsion regarding said marketing, in an "I'm revolted but I can't look away... and in fact am I actually that revolted?.... Gosh, should I be more revolted? Am I actually falling for this?" kind of way).

At this point, I'm thinking that my favorite is the title essay, which is among the shortest in the collection but definitely the most visceral and, at many points, just plain sad. I have a neuroscience background, and can vouch for the moral and biological complexity of the question over whether animals without cerebral cortices "experience" pain. Warning: yes, the essay's description of a lobster's behavior during the boiling process dissuaded me from eating lobster ever again.

Other standouts: "Up, Simba," about the author's travels with a press contingent during John McCain's 2000 "Straight Talk Express" ride for the Republican presidential nomination. This is one that, again, just ends up damn sad, showing just how meaningless political campaigns are. [Side note to those who have read this essay -- DFW's account of McCain's well-documented POW years is fantastic, but raised a questions I'd never thought of before, and apparently DFW didn't either -- Could young McCain have "refused" to be released from the POW camp based on his adherence to a code? I mean, if the VietCong had wanted to release him for publicity reasons, they could have just knocked him upside the head, dumped him in a jeep, and driven him to wherever they wanted to leave him. The very fact that I'm thinking this probably means that I am one of the young American cynics DFW both chastizes and sympathizes with in the course of the essay.] Also outstanding are "Big Red Son" and "Host," the latter of which is made fascinating by the use of sidenotes, with sidenotes on sidenotes, and I think in one case a sidenote on a sidenote on a sidenote. (I like the sidenotes; there will be dissenters I'm sure)

Do it -- this is filet mignon -- I mean lobster -- I mean uh a high-quality vegetarian feast for the mind.

One of the other essays which is a droll book review of a reference text, Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American (or perhaps English) Usage," is the best 60 pages of insightful analysis at multiple levels and pure wit that this reviewer knows to exist. For those who write seriously in the English language, if the essay is understood (which does require work) it is life altering.

The essay "Consider the Lobster" has changed my life. Wallace's ruminations on lobster are thought-provoking and eye-opening, no matter what your personal beliefs about lobsters, boiling, and pain are. So, to be fair, I'll give you my beliefs upfront: lobster is way too much work to eat, way too tasteless without butter, and doesn't interest me at all. At the same time, I worry much more about force-fed ducks and debeaked chickens (I am an omnivore, yes) than I do about boiled-alive lobsters.

Wallace has made an important academic contribution on the subject of consuming meat, whether it be mammals or shellfish. His assigned magazine task for the title essay was covering the Maine Lobster Festival. Let me give you a smattering of the questions he raised for me (which still resonate with me weeks later): Why do we call meat by pseudonyms like beef and pork, while sea-dwelling animals are called by their common animal names? Should Maine look down on the Lobster Fest as a tourist trap, when all of us must admit to being tourists at one time in our lives? Really, how is eating lobster on a paper plate with chinzy paper napkins any different than any Midwest festival celebrating beef or corn? Is celebrating the "World's Largest Lobster Cooker" a little obscene--would we celebrate beef by cheering at the world's biggest slaughterhouse?

The highlight of the essay is Wallace's cogitation on pain--on what pain is, what thinking animals are, what preferences are, basic neuroscience, a comparison of mammals to humans and other life forms, and the behavior of lobsters in boiling water. Then comes the downfall of Wallace, the attitude which ruins every essay he writes. He's not satisfied to write a few pseudo-apologetic sentences about how Gourmet magazine readers may not want to read about the ethical aspects of their food, but he hopes they should open their minds. Nope, he harps endlessly in his conclusion about how the magazine's reader base needs to consider moving out of their sheltered gourmet-loving lives and listen to his arguments. As someone who had already been moved by his arguments, I was repulsed by his concluding lecture--almost enough just to adopt a contrary point of view to spite him.

So, now you know my take on Wallace. There are some gems in his musings, but his uppity attitude overshadows any insightful comments he makes. In his essay on 9/11/2001, he comments on the lovely, educated, but woefully mis-informed Midwestern church ladies he spent the day of September 11th with. They were just sad and woeful, but they didn't have the cynicism (intellect?) of a New Yorker who would notice that President Bush's speech was eerily similar to certain movie lines, that the television networks only showed x, y, and z, that it was a good career boost for the President, and so on. Let me set the record clear--I am a cynical liberal Northeasterner. I lived in New York on 9/11/2001. I despise our President. And I (along with my extreme left-wing and anarchist roommates) spent the entire day of September 11th sobbing in the living room, watching television. We made no snarky comments. We grieved. I might have developed some conspiracy theories later, but trust me, I was right there with Mrs. T in Bloomington, Illinois on that fateful day. Our whole nation was in pain, and just because Wallace was a super-cool former NY resident who happened to be in IL at the time, he is no better than his peers in the Midwest. I am disgusted that he used the tragedy of 9/11 to write an essay which elevates his status as one of the Americans (aka New Yorkers) who the terrorists really hate (as opposed to the Midwest Americans). (While that is not a direct quote, that is precisely the sentiment of Wallace's concluding remarks in his 9/11 essay).

The remainder of Wallace's essays did not win me over. He attended the Adult Video News annual pornography awards, and the resulting essay is aimless. He opens by celebrating the lack of pretension in the porno industry--by admiring their pure financial success when compared to the Hollywood Oscar-obsessed world. He later contradicts himself by attacking the AVN voting system and mocking the nom de guerres of the voting committee. Wallace's pseudo-intellectual statements on porn are just wrong--in 1997, he thinks that porn is going so extreme that snuff films are right around the corner. He claims that bizzaro filth means that we will be wanting to see girls die on camera. So, there are a few extreme wackos, and there are extreme fetishes in this industry--that means that all of American is jonesing for snuff films?? (I do, of course, have the benefit of nine years of hindsight on these predictions, but even so, porn is mainstream, and no women are going to get killed to sell more videos. Your reviewer promises you this. Call me in twenty years and I'll still be right.) Wallace also makes the statement that the porn industry has welcomed the mainstream Hollywood hit Boogie Nights despite the fact that "everyone in the industry is either portrayed as either creepness or filth, or a combination of both." Clearly, Wallace has not seen this film, which is a brilliant study of a range of characters, some of whom are positive and genuine, some of whom are ruined by drugs, some of whom are fighting personal demons. It's a portrayal of the industry as any other (sports, music, mainstream acting, etc), in which people have wild success and extreme downfalls. I'm sorry our author missed that point.

How much more can I beat up on this man? Ahh, the Tracy Austin memoir essay. 70% of this essay is pure brilliance, as a book review. I haven't read Austin's memoir, but I believe Wallace--Austin is a brilliant tennis player, but a terrible narrator, and anyone looking for inspiration should steer clear of her book. As a book review, this essay is spot-on, and one of my favorite literary pieces. But Wallace doesn't stop there. Nope, he needs to lecture on (1) how the athlete auto-biography always leaves the reader in this unsatisfied position and (2) what Tracy Austin should have written about. Wallace seems to think that his disappointment in his hero (Austin) sums up everyone's experience with hero worship. Most of us know not to expect musical or athletic heros to write literary masterpieces. Wallace can't accept that, and wants to reprimand his hero, even if he gives an "out" in the end by stating that athletic brilliance requires a certain cluelessness about their natural genius. He also makes blanket statements about "athlete autobiographies" with no supporting evidence other than his experience with Austin's memoir.

No matter how spot-on Wallace's observations are, he twists his remarks to denigrate either the reader or his subjects. The writing is top notch, the research is impeccable, but the experience of listening to this man can leave the reader with negative feelings.

These are not essays; they are articles and only a few are even readable. The first one, about the pornography convention, certainly could function as A Clockwork Orange kind of therapy for porn addicts. "Consider the Lobster," also, could certainly guarantee you will never, no matter how much you like to eat lobster, go to the Maine Lobster Festival. His review of Tracy Austin's autobiography will never, ever sell a copy of THAT book. (Though he doesn't get it that athletes are by definition not intellectuals). The Updike review nails Mr. Updike with a delightful finality. I must admit I didn't finish most of the other articles herein. Maybe I should have tried harder with some of them, but why? There are other collections of reviews/essays which don't have half-page footnotes, and footnotes for the footnotes. Bottom line: Wallace seems to have been terrified that some reader might suspect him of not being the smartest guy in the room--or--horror of horrors---UNCOOL. This is bound to limit a writer's creativity.

Not since listening to Jimmy Carter's "Living Faith" has any book put me to sleep so easily. I used to bring his tapes on flights with me to lull me to sleep. I now have a wonderful replacement in this book.

I love reading essays so when I read the glowing blurbs and the high praise on the store I thought I could not miss. But every time I started to read - I think I started on the essay involving his observations on going to the video porn convention - I just not keep my mind from wandering. It was just so boring. So incredibly dull. Unbelievably awfully hard to read. I kept thinking - where is the funny? Where is the wit? The interest? The keen observation? Then - I thought why is that man putting unwrapped cookies in his pocket? I wonder if the water in the lav is potable. Does this seat back go back any further and will I disturb the woman's cocktail on her tray table if I go back? Yep. MIND WANDERS while reading this. But soon I found that - say - I could read about being on the trail with the 2000 McCain campaign and suddenly fall into a deep sleep only to be revived by touchdown at MIA. I could consider the lobster right through page two. Next thing I knew JFK was directly below.

So - If you need a sleeping... draft... you should consider the lobster and his other essays. If you want to spend some time on some entertaining essays - consider the collection in "In Fact". Or for some humor on CD how about some Davis Sedaris. Contemplative? How about Thoreau's "Walking"?

But for sleeping - "Consider the Lobster and Other Essays" is peerless.

Unbearable.

I really tried to give this a chance--listened to all but 15 minutes of the 3-hour, 45-minute audiobook. Immediately I was irritated by David Foster Wallace's monotonous droning. I'm not trying to be mean...I'm sorry he's gone...but having someone else read this might have made it bearable.

Wallace uses a lot of footnotes in these essays. Instead of introducing them with the word "footnote," and closing them with "end footnote" (a la "quote," "end quote"), he attempts to change the sound of his voice to indicate when a footnote is being read. This method was just confusing. Some footnotes are really long, and sometimes it's hard to tell whether he is reading in his "normal" voice or his footnote voice.

I found the subject matter ranging from dreary to just plain irritating.

Chapter 1: 50 minutes of minutae on lobsters, a particular lobster festival in Maine, and how lobsters bound for human dinner plates typically meet their horrific end.

Chapter 2: 27 minutes describing life in a Bloomington, Indiana, neighborhood on 9/11.

Chapter 3: 2-hour play-by-play of the American porn film industry's convention and awards in Vegas. I'll be honest, I had to cut this one short. I listened for at least an hour and a half, but I simply couldn't take any more. If I heard the word "starlet" once, I heard it a hundred times. I have no interest in porn, the people who make it, or their big annual bash in Vegas. It was 100% annoying for me to listen to someone droning monotonously about that. I couldn't stomach a full 2 hours.

Chapter 4: For 32 minutes, Wallace tells us how crappy and disappointing it was to read teen tennis star Tracy Austin's autobiography. This chapter begins with a fairly long discussion of how people love to read biographies of pro sports stars (we do? Is this what has been missing from my life, lo, these 43 years?). Then he gives glimpses into Austin's life while bashing her s***ty, boring book. A barrel of fun, as you can imagine.

Bottom line: Do NOT assume that this audiobook will make your dreary commute more interesting. I bought it for that purpose, and every chapter made me want to jam a screwdriver into my ears while driving.

Consider The Lobster

I'm new to David Foster Wallace. This is the first book of his that I have read and possibly the last. The title is catchy and after a few clicks on the Google search I decided to add this to my reading wish list.

Consider the Lobster is a collection of essays; described as "describing the perversities of modern American life (by Los Angeles Times Book Review)".

Mid-way through the first essay, Big Red Son, I'm bored. The reader is taken along as Wallace and friends are escorted around the annual Adult Video Awards festivities in Las Vegas 1998. I keep reading because I'm hoping for a clincher; a punch line; something that's makes me smile or tells me something I didn't already know or could figure about that goes on at these places. Vapid. Porn stars, some pretty and some handsome, most overly made up and fans that react uncomfortably meeting someone they've watched have sex; an awards show and a anti-climatic ending.

What follows is a review of John Updike; which is great if you're a Lit student or a huge Updike fan or detractor. If not, it's just jargon.

I was expecting a text of witty commentary on our times; something of a David Sedaris. What I got was a literary snoot and college professor's commentary on our times. With all the footnotes, I, unbeknownst to me, entered an advanced college lit class.

In one essay Wallace writes, "I am not shocked or offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it." Well said, and finally we both can agree.

If your a Professor of English this book might be up your alley. Otherwise, stay away!

The first essay is about an adult film awards show. it's lengthy and rather hilarious. But the rest of the book is a snoozer.

absolute pap from the king of "witless" wit.

I find this highly offensive, humorless, derivative droll-These essays are obvious to the point of subtlety (if that's possible?) But then again it all makes sense when one considers the current state of political/cultural/ stagnancy.