Consider the lobster, and other essays
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult-video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2015–2021years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I liked Infinite Jest and Consider The Lobster And Other Essays. Not easy reads in my opinion, especially Infinite Jest obviously, but interesting and original books.
The movie The End of the Tour (2015), although most probably inaccurate in his portrait of the man (from what I’ve read), is an enjoyable fiction that just happens to use Wallace as one of the characters. I recommend it.
- I'm reading Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. I forgot until I picked this book up again how much fun it is to read David Foster Wallace. Despite all the footnotes, he's very engaging.
Also, my girlfriend just sneaked Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love into my computer bag the other day. I haven't read him in a long time, but coincidentally was just very recently talking to a friend about What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, which is mostly unrelated to the Carver book, but also a really good read about his life of running.
- “It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get -- the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke -- that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.” ― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
