**** Patrick O’Brian – Master and Commander
**** Patrick O’Brian – Post Captain
*** David Foster Wallace – Girl with Curious Hair

Yes, I’ve started rereading the Aubrey books. They’re just as good the second time, plus the additional pleasure of seeing previews of future people and events (oh look! it’s Pullings! etc).

Girl with Curious Hair is an interesting read for the DFWophile. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I feel like it’s still a little unformed. I consider his peak to be “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Infinite Jest” and you can see him here playing with some of the things that would appear in those (e.g. reader annoyance, his very particular ways of rendering dialogue, certain obsessions with media, consumption, etc) but not doing it quite as well. The book’s novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is a particular example of this. It is very DFWian in its way, but ultimately doesn’t really work (for me anyway) — it gets to seem a bit boring and annoying and pointless and sometimes tediously metafictional. In my opinion, DFW mastered these kinds of things in his best writing, but he was always in danger of falling into one or another of these traps, even later on. In Girl with Curious Hair, you see him working out some of his techniques, and you get a flavor of his later mastery, but with a lot of fail.

The book did however lead me to come across this enlightening insight into DFW, found here:

It wasn’t until Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace was released did any critical work begin to focus upon the importance of Westward to DFW’s direction. On pages 16 and 17 of his publication, Boswell revealed that DFW had used the phrase ‘cynicism and naivete’ in Westward, in his essay E Unibus Pluram, and in Infinite Jest. Boswell wrote that Wallace ‘does not merely join cynicism and naivete: rather, he employs cynicism – here figured as sophisticated self-reflexive irony – to recover a learned form of heartfelt naivete, his work’s ultimate mode and what the work “really means,” a mode that Wallace equates with the “really human.” ‘

that rings true. There were some other good links there and here.