Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

Somewhere there is a film so perfectly entertaining that anyone who watches it cannot stop, forgets to eat or sleep or move, and dies in front of the screen, content. Three worlds revolve around that lethal cartridge in David Foster Wallace's _Infinite Jest_: a tennis academy full of gifted, joyless teenagers; a Boston halfway house where addicts crawl through early recovery one unglamorous day at a time; and a cell of wheelchair-bound Québécois separatists hunting the film as a weapon. The book runs a thousand pages and carries 388 endnotes, and the endnotes are not a stunt; they are the disease itself made into form, a mind so busy footnoting its own experience that it cannot simply live it. What the novel wants, underneath all the dazzle, is almost unbearably simple: to feel something real in a culture engineered to amuse you to death. Don Gately, a huge and gentle man clawing his way through early sobriety, carries that wish further than anyone, and he will break your heart trying.