I had been holding off on reading The Broom of the System, because it was one of the last David Foster Wallace Books I hadn’t read and I wanted to save it – but it finally came up on my Libby queue so I just read it.
I guess this was unfounded – or maybe just because I hadn’t heard too many people rave about it the way they rave about other DFW texts – but I was expecting it to be not so great.
But, unsurprisingly in retrospect, I loved it. If you love DFW, it’s worth a read.
There’s a fixation on psychology and strange loops (“shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves”) that I suppose many would find a bit overly intellectual, but I enjoy this kinds of thing, and I guess that’s why I enjoy DFW.
Perhaps the best thing in this book are the character names, eg:
- Candy Mandible
- Peter Abbott
- Biff Diggerence
- Rick Vigorous
- Andrew Lang aka Wang-Dang Lang
- etc
So good…
- Read The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace