Something about Infinite Jest and empathy and metempsychosis and the actual, literal transfer of minds vs. the identification of self in other vs. the meltdown of both those concepts at like the most basic level.
aside on technique.
Currently reading a second-hand EPUB with funky formatting and OCR artifacts in Readmill on iPad mini. Also purchased a legit Amazon I.J. mobi for Kindle, which works in the Kindle app on iPad, iPhone and laptop. Kindle app has a nice search function and—as of a recent update—a much better highlighting feel than Readmill. (Readmill suffers from some highlighting bugs which have twice led me to just plain drop the iPad on the bed in frustration.)
Readmill’s website keeps and shares my highlights which also appear in the app. Readmill also gathers Kindle highlights via a manual process involving a bookmarklet on laptop. All the Readmill highlights also post automatically to a text file in Dropbox via Javier Arce’s Box of Quotes. (I’m still considering what to do with those. Visual map? Arcades-like essay? TBD.)
I have no paper copy of the book at hand, but first read it in paperback in 1999. I did not take notes then, nor write in the margins.
As far as the text itself, both the EPUB and mobi files have proper inline links to footnotes, but fall short at sub-notes. Kindle offers metaphorical “dog-eared corners” for both important pages and bookmarking before performing searches.
So far, no noticeable “social reading” or sharing or conversations in, on, or about the book. But a number of people have bought the Kindle version after I shared the link and there are a dozen or more readers of it on Readmill. A few of us quietly like each others’ highlights and leave it at that. As a non-sequential book, every highlight is essentially a spoiler if you’re still even bothering with that.
Overall: a more lightweight and visually pleasant reading experience, with unlocked quotations and less pre-emptive planning about when to dive in. The book always on my person, the hours and pages counting up and up.