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| Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays | 
 enlarge | Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.99
Buy New: $8.05
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Avg. Customer Rating:  49 reviews
Sales Rank: 1734
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0316013323
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.54
EAN: 9780316013321
ASIN: 0316013323
Publication Date: July 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW, IN-HOUSE READY TO SHIP!!! NOT A BARGAIN, REMAINDER OR BOOKCLUB BOOK!!! WE ARE A 5 STAR SELLER.
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| Customer Reviews:
unconscious...just a fancy word for 'soul' December 11, 2005
17 out of 21 found this review helpful
I more or less accidenally bought this book the night before it came out, just checking to see if it was available. Happenstance. I am totally pleased with this collection of essays. DFW seems to have found or worked with his 'god-shaped hole' and it shows in a freshly (some of these were done around 1996, allbeit updated or revised er edited probably a bit since) compassionate flavor to his prose. I was finishing the article on Authority and American Usage this afternoon and I realized for a second as I caught my breath in between his platinum clauses, how thoroughly engaging his writing style is. But its the compassion that's most noticable for me. I considered his past book's work pretentious yet incredibly smart - just kind of off-puttingly so. He comes off both smart and sensitive in this collection. The footnotes while naturally digressive, are almost 90% of the time entertaining and I laughed me arse off quite a bit in the last week while reading most this stuff (two essays to go).
RELEVANT AND HIGHLY RECCOMMENED FOR ALL PATIENT READING PEOPLE SEMI-INTERESTED IN CULTURE TODAY.
It's tough to try honestly to break this down without doing some sort of injustice to Consider The Lobster. The essays are worth a purchase (perhaps discounted though, its kind of pricey right now I confess).
Some comments, and a question February 9, 2006
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
I bought and read DFW's "Consider the Lobster" unseen and essentially unknown, on the strength of a review in the Chicago Tribune Sunday book section. It was an excerpt from the essay "Authority and American Usage" which grabbed me. The author asked, "Did you know American lexicography even HAD a seamy underbelly?" Well sir, when I read a sentence like that, something in my brain, maybe prostaglandins or endorphins or some other exotic brain chemicals discussed in the title essay take over, and I am left with a compelling, almost compulsive need to hear what this writer has to say. Full disclosure: I am not all that well read, and I had never heard of DFW before this, let alone read him.
OK. That's enough of that. Now, pleasantly enough, after puzzling my way through the essays on pornography, Kafka and Updike (1 outta 3 ain't bad, and more on the puzzlement below), I arrived at the essay which originally piqued (not "peaked", dear other reviewer) my interest. As it happens, I discovered Garner's dictionary quite by accident and quite by myself some 5 years ago, and was immediately -- and I do mean immediately, I am not the kind of person who sits down and reads dictionaries cover to cover -- struck by the clarity, moderation, and sheer common sense of Mr. Garner. I knew I was in possession of a classic treatise on the American language in the late stages of the 20th century, although I did not know exactly why. It just FELT right. I am forever indebted to Mr. Wallace for giving me the words to express what I felt way back in 1999 when I read Garner's preface, and felt like I had just made a new friend.
I should, perhaps, briefly explain how a person like myself, with little formal education (2 years of college), should come to be in possession of a usage dictionary -- ANY usage dictionary, let alone one as brilliant as this one -- and the answer is as simple as the media you, dear reader, are using to read these words: the internet. One of my first actions upon being released online was to head directly to the many chat rooms online, where I rapidly made the acquaintance of a pleasant young Ukranian woman who was trying to supplement her meager income by teaching English to other Ukranians, and who asked me for source materials. The relationship did not pan out, and I was left with several grammar and usage books which I find relatively worthless to me, but Garner's ADMAU made it all worthwhile.
And I feel I must take issue with the above reviewer who likened this particular work with Lynn Truss' "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves". I've read this book, I've belly-laughed my way through it, but, dear Sir or Madam, it's a book about punctuation, and Garner's dictionary is about usage, and if you need to have the difference explained, I can do so, but I'd gently advise you in the interim to refrain from posting any essays on Montaigne -- you gotta learn to crawl before you can run.
OK then -- now, onto the rest of the Lobster book, and my big question: Mr. Wallace, loyal readers of Mr. Wallace, blind fans of Mr. Wallace, Mr. Wallace's editors and publishers -- the footnotes -- and asides -- and the asides within footnotes -- Good GOD, people! Isn't there a better way? I've read some right good writers in my time, I think, Mencken, Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Victor Klemperer (shameless plug for a deceased author, but his 2 volume diary of life under Nazi rule is fascinating and compelling), and never, NEVER, have I encountered so many distractions from the main text. Mr. Wallace, you're an excellent writer, far better, and far more learned than me, can't you find some way to incorporate all that stuff in the text? Most other writers do.
Just for laughs, I'm going to google some of your stuff, if it's still online, and see how many (if any) of the footnotes made it into print. Bottom line: this is a great read, Mr. Wallace has an excellent command of the language, the insatiable curiosity of a true journalist, the self-deprecating humor of a philosopher who's had it thrust upon him (nobody wears that mantle voluntarily in this century, do they?), and the down-home common sense of a midwestern boy from the baby-boom generation ( I got your back, Dave ).
[footnote: I've just re-read this review before posting it, and it's pretty awful, grammatically, I see I've switched tenses in the middle of paragraphs several times, and spent way too much time on Garner's dictionary without fully explaining that it's an integral chapter in the book, but you know what? It's 4:30 in the morning here, and I'm going to bed. "Consider the Lobster" is great, but it has too many footnotes] (end footnote)
Another Winner for Wallace February 26, 2006
13 out of 28 found this review helpful
First off, in the interests of full disclosure, I corresponded with Wallace back in the Nineties, and he encouraged me as to my writing style in my yet to be published novel (I'm on a third rewrite). So, perhaps this biases me here, though I'm inclined not to think so.
This book should be bought for the essay "Authority and the American Usage" alone. In fact, every incoming American Frosh (ahem, and many an American academic) should have it as prescribed (not in the lexicographic sense) reading....and rereading. It's by far the best work he's done ever in the non-fiction department. It is non-fiction work of sheer genius....and humour too.
The other essays vary in quality---See, I'm not an absolute devotee----and my supposition is that many a reader (like myself) is not going to find the intricacies of the porn industry particularly interesting. The title piece is good, especially given the droll fact that it was written for Gourmet magazine!! I'll not comment on the rest except that they vary in quality and interest from extremely good to slightly less than extremely good. Wallace IS just such a great writer.
But,CAVEAT LECTOR,the last essay "Host" was-pay attention-not written-but DESIGNED by Maria Mundaca and Peter Bernard. The credits are on the copyright page. Let that be a warning as to what lies in store. This essay took me so long to read because I would feel the onset of a migraine after three pages of trying to negotiate "Host."-This, methinks, is just too something-or-other by half for a writer who's already earned his Genius Award. Thus, the four stars.
Go forth and read.
 A prime example of an unreadable book October 1, 2007
10 out of 36 found this review helpful
I'm trying to like essayists - there's just something cute about the formalization of thoughts, never growing up of needing to be approved by the English teacher that is the literary world.
But seriously, David Foster Wallace? After I had finished this, mainly finished not finishing any of the single essays, I got the impression that this is an an attempt to create the absolute unreadable work, an anti-art prank. Not unreadable in the sense of undecipherable, more like in the sense of local newspaper meets interminably boring literary analysis.
I also thought it was a bit magaziney, in two senses of the word. First of all, it gives the impression of someone who sets out from zero-knowledge to gather bits and pieces of the topic they've selected without much personal commitment (only what you'd call intellectual vigor), as opposed to the great writer sort of thing, desperately trying to make sense of the conflict in their inner world and putting it on paper as coherently as you possibly can. I guess that's the point of it too, being an intellectual journalist, but I think it's completely unnecessary to distance yourself from the subject like that. It distances the readers as well. Second of all it was way too obsessed with details and superficial things.
It's not new or original either IMO. I'm reminded of the 80s/90s way of thinking a lot here, or what's my conception of it anyway. And people like P.J. O'Rourke. The humorists or whatever. Pretty basic stuff.
And I'm not saying that maybe it's just me. If you seriously like this kind of stuff, you're distracted from reality in some major way.
 fabulous INFINITE JEST December 24, 2005
7 out of 19 found this review helpful
Though this reviewer rarely reads essay collections, this form of literature is both my favorite and my most detested format (corollary to the 50 page rule of why keep reading if it so bad, for essays a 20 page rule). When satirically amusing and filled with irony on "postmodern" life, nothing beats an essay such as classics like the "postmodern" "How to Cook Roast Pig" or "A Modest Proposal".
David Foster Wallace provides ten delightful articles on a variety of topics ranging from the relativity of pornography to generalizing the insipidness of sports autobiographies extracting from Tracy Austin's perfect tennis adventure (Bill and Ted for a set anyone). In Mr. Wallace's delightful way, if one wants to know whether a lobster feels pain while undergoing scalding water treatment, don't ask the cook, the lobsterman, or the zoologist; go to the source (not sauce): ask the lobster who obviously is not dancing their life away. Same goes to McCain's presidential bid lost during a failed debate with a fundamentalist demanding the senator turn no cheek insisting Christ condemned homosexuality. Though the asides can be difficult to follow with abbrev, they are fun to follow up on with their deeper explanations and Americanization of the English language through ibid. Readers will appreciate the deep look at "postmodern" American life as a fabulous INFINITE JEST.
Harriet Klausner
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