I’ve been looking for a book that is, to the extent that it is posible to do so, similar to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest”.
Of course I very much liked the book, not least because of its ambition, but also because I find many of the descriptions and insights in this book, published in 1996, to be highly relevant to today’s “addicted society”, for lack of a better term.
Are there any books, that may not be well known, that strikes a loose resemblance to Infinite Jest?
I am looking for something either from the same era (late 1990’s, or contemporary) that is as ambitious and accurate, though obviously not necesarilly as good as IJ. This of course rules out other, much earlier masterpieces such as Gravity’s Rainbow, or even the Recognitions due to the reléase date of the novels.
Heck, you could point to 1984 and Brave New World as speculative fiction where some key points have come true. Neuromancer by William Gibson. Snow Crash and the rest of Neal Stephenson’s work predicted today’s internet, nanotech (The Diamond Age) and others.
For books that are less speculative but are ambitious, try the books by David Mitchell like the Cloud Atlas and his new one the Bone Clocks…
Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Five “books” published in three volumes. Sprawling, multi-genre, ambitious. Set mainly in seventeenth-century Europe, it details a lot of what can be be can seen as the birth of the modern world, especially through the beginnings of the Enlightenment.
Very, very different from Infintite Jest, but worth a look.
