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David Foster Wallace: In His Own Words by David Foster Wallace - ★★★
I listened to the audio book version of David Foster Wallace in his own words, and there were parts that I liked and there are parts that I didn't like.
In the beginning, it was just a joy to hear the author's voice after reading him so much and for so long, to hear him drop his GS, to hear the kind of faint way that he read his prose, the laid back Midwestern style, and the way that even though he was reading horrifying things, he doesn't really react to them. He reads them in a neutral way. He reads them as if he too is horrified by what the author's saying, but he is the the author himself. So it's an interesting reading. It's an interesting person to try to get to know through an audio book recording that's already 11 years old at this point in 2025
but then the subject material moved on, and it got to the more unpleasant parts of Wallace, horrible, graphic depictions of rape, human beings being turned into, quote, things. And the way that Wallace does it is he really gets you in there and gets you thinking about both sides of it, and thinks you about his friend who was taken captive, and how his friend was able to make a psychic connection with the person who took her captive and to together, her friend was able to escape and was let go by the person that attempted to hurt her more. But walls describes it in such detail, it's almost painful. Truly is painful to listen to. So I didn't like those parts much. But then it drifts back into the more normal Wallace of thinking about day to day life and some incredibly predictive pieces about 911 and life in a small town, what it's like to be the only one who doesn't have a television and how these small town people reacted to what Wallace, in prescient knowledge, calls the horror, even one of the characters discusses how the play the buildings collapsing into their footprint looked like a spaceship taking off the perfect cylindrical column nature of it. And Wallace himself thought that perhaps when the second building collapsed, was it not a replay of the first so perfectly the collapsing. He also discussed the people jumping off the building footage and how they would never show it again. All in all, the book finishes out with this is water, the great commencement speech by Wallace. But it was just great to spend time with the great man, to hear him read the books in his own words. And while some of the curious interviews with horrible men may have been cringe worthy and difficult to take, as well as if you know anything about the recent attempts to revise the character of Wallace and to basically destroy him, maybe these horrible examples lead you to believe that more that's to say nothing of the true horror show of consider the lobster with the difficult to take realities of boiling a living creature alive so that humans can eat it. Not a lobster man myself, but certainly hard to be one after hearing Wallace describe it again in Wallace in detail,
I still like him. I still miss him. I like the hard to read books. I like that he challenged us. And I even like the movie where the guy from How I Met Your Mother plays in always fun to spend time with. David Foster Wallace. Alas, I don't think there's that many more audio books, especially ones quote in his own words. Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy it, too. Until next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
In the beginning, it was just a joy to hear the author's voice after reading him so much and for so long, to hear him drop his GS, to hear the kind of faint way that he read his prose, the laid back Midwestern style, and the way that even though he was reading horrifying things, he doesn't really react to them. He reads them in a neutral way. He reads them as if he too is horrified by what the author's saying, but he is the the author himself. So it's an interesting reading. It's an interesting person to try to get to know through an audio book recording that's already 11 years old at this point in 2025
but then the subject material moved on, and it got to the more unpleasant parts of Wallace, horrible, graphic depictions of rape, human beings being turned into, quote, things. And the way that Wallace does it is he really gets you in there and gets you thinking about both sides of it, and thinks you about his friend who was taken captive, and how his friend was able to make a psychic connection with the person who took her captive and to together, her friend was able to escape and was let go by the person that attempted to hurt her more. But walls describes it in such detail, it's almost painful. Truly is painful to listen to. So I didn't like those parts much. But then it drifts back into the more normal Wallace of thinking about day to day life and some incredibly predictive pieces about 911 and life in a small town, what it's like to be the only one who doesn't have a television and how these small town people reacted to what Wallace, in prescient knowledge, calls the horror, even one of the characters discusses how the play the buildings collapsing into their footprint looked like a spaceship taking off the perfect cylindrical column nature of it. And Wallace himself thought that perhaps when the second building collapsed, was it not a replay of the first so perfectly the collapsing. He also discussed the people jumping off the building footage and how they would never show it again. All in all, the book finishes out with this is water, the great commencement speech by Wallace. But it was just great to spend time with the great man, to hear him read the books in his own words. And while some of the curious interviews with horrible men may have been cringe worthy and difficult to take, as well as if you know anything about the recent attempts to revise the character of Wallace and to basically destroy him, maybe these horrible examples lead you to believe that more that's to say nothing of the true horror show of consider the lobster with the difficult to take realities of boiling a living creature alive so that humans can eat it. Not a lobster man myself, but certainly hard to be one after hearing Wallace describe it again in Wallace in detail,
I still like him. I still miss him. I like the hard to read books. I like that he challenged us. And I even like the movie where the guy from How I Met Your Mother plays in always fun to spend time with. David Foster Wallace. Alas, I don't think there's that many more audio books, especially ones quote in his own words. Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy it, too. Until next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai