Third try I've read this so far. Gotten through 350 pages - best yet. Don't understand why I've stopped so far. I like DFW's other books, his digressions, and I like long books. Don't know why this book is so impenetrable to me. It mocks me on the shelf. I'll finish you someday, I swear. 
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 Done. 
 Read the last two hundred pages in a long binge that took up most of the day. 
 A particularly eloquent Goodreads reviewer said that after you finish a really good book, you'll rate the thing five stars in a 'post-coital effusion'. (Please tell me who it is so I can cite them!) 
 I must respectfully disagree for this case. It's a withdrawal. My eyes sting, my hands tremble. The book is covered with my scrawl and the binding cracks and some of the endnotes are falling out. I need to lie down. Give me a moment. I need more. I'll get the Pale King and the new short story compilation. There has to be more. Please. Please. There has to be. Why are you gone, Dave. 
 This is a multitude. This behemoth could might have been split up (like 2666) into several separate novels and the reader left to figure out the metatextual framework. But considering how tightly they interweave in the latter portions of the book (or perhaps earlier, if I had not noticed), that's simply how it is. 
 A great deal of the reviewers found this book to be funny. I confess that I didn't find it too funny at all. I had some wry bitter laughs at some scenes, although some of these might not have originally meant to have been funny. The head in the microwave for example. Long bitter laughs of disbelief and terror. Kafka, it is recorded, laughed when he wrote his novels. Maybe it'd be something like that. 
 Rather the big Overarching Theme is addiction, and how he sees a great many people want to be addicted to something, to give themselves up to it, and how much of a constant struggle it is to try and be aware of existence - THIS IS WATER. My addiction happens to be reading, from which I am recovering. I have a job now. 
 The passages on depression are too detailed and emotion to be merely gained from clinical depictions and anecdotes - there is some clear personal experience with this utter all-devouring, crushing despair which perverts and destroys even the best. 
 DFW understood and communicated a lot of things, and intensely struggled with himself to convince that it is worth saying, or that it is really Sincere and not resorting to cliche. His idiosyncratic and overlong writing style is His, and no one else's. It is a shame he is gone.