A tribute to David: Recommended Reading

The world lost one of its most genuine souls and one of its most entertaining writers in one moment Friday, as David Foster Wallace, 46, hanged himself in his Claremont, Calif., home. His epic "Infinite Jest" ranks among my favorite books of all time because it calls such intense attention unto the task of being human. We're all observing and observing that observation and so on, even when we don't realize it. To live involves a lot of lying, to yourself and to others, about your intentions. It's a beautiful and tragic concept to reckon.

Laura Miller wrote a fairly brief but spot-on tribute to her favorite author and mine at Salon.com. If I'd had the chance, I'd have written a very similar piece because she got a lot of the same things out of DFW's work that I did.

He meant, with his footnotes and his digressions, to acknowledge the agonies of self-consciousness and the "difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know." Point taken. Still, I read about his characters, each tennis prodigy and recovering addict and transvestite hooker and yuppie and ad exec and game show contestant and closeted political aide, and thought: Hey, I know you. Maybe it was an illusion -- Wallace would have been the first to admit as much -- but it made me feel less alone, too.