Perhaps the only thing with broader appeal than a DFW novel about tax accounting and the IRS is a DFW book about fairly advance mathematics.
I love both DFW and math, so I loved Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.
Ostensibly, this book is like an excellent college math survey course, but really it’s about the human desire for order, systems, abstraction, knowledge, clarity, precision – and our inability to achieve this. Thematically, it’s not unlike When We Cease to Understand the World (though it’s not nearly as narrative and psychological).
If you like math and DFW, you’ll probably like this book. If not…
- Everything and More, David Foster Wallace