Yeah, well, "love" and "death" are single syllable words and not even eighth graders know what the hell those mean. And hey, so is "jest"

I can't tell you how many times I've wondered how many words are in Infinite Jest. I mean, I know there's a lot of words in there. It's a big book and there's no white space and the font sometimes gets tiny. But short of sitting down with a pen, a pad of paper, a copy of Wallace's boat anchor, and an otaku-like love of tick marks, I've had no way of getting that stat. The question of whether the book was, truly, you know, infinite, was doomed to remained unanswered, until the end of time or my rise to "Hey Dave, can I buy you a beer"-levels of fame and importance, whichever came first.

Until now. Now, thanks to this post at Pamie.com, which I got the link to through some other blog, though I've forgotten which one, so I'm overcompensating by making this link REALLY big, I now know that Infinite Jest has 479,198 words in it. (I've left undetermined whether that includes the end-notes. I suspect not.) I can also tell you that you're getting 25,287 words per dollar spent on the book, which makes it, as far as I'm concerned, the best, ultimate, and final value for your hard-earned literary-minded dollar. Also, Infinite Jest barely edges out Me Talk Pretty One Day on the "Persons under this grade level must be accompanied by a legal guardian" Flesch-Kincaid Index, with IJ scoring a 9.3 grade level to MTPOD's 9.2. Because, you know. That makes sense.

Were I a big famous published author, I think this feature would scare the hell out of me. I'd be forever worried that readers would decide that they weren't in the mood for my 7.2 grade level book; really, they were feeling a little bit more 6.8-ish that day. I'd probably be worried that my concordance totally sucks or that I'm not giving the reader enough of a workout in terms of words-per-weight. I'd probably get nothing done anymore, certain my future were doomed to low F-K scores and poor word counts.

But right now I'm a total nobody and so I can check stats to my heart's content. Like, The Corrections isn't even half as long as IJ but you do get close to the same words/dollar value. By way of comparison, Pamela Anderson's novel is worth one quarter of Franzen's and only one fifth of Wallace's! Whodathunk? (Though all three have almost exactly the same average number of syllables per word. Hey, someone find me a 1.5 length syllable, eh?)

Okay, maybe I overstated the case when I said IJ is the best possible value; this book (which, yes, I linked earlier, no, you're not experiencing deja vu) offers almost twice as many words for each dollar you spend on it. Of course quantity means a sacrifice in quality--you drop about two grade levels if you make the switch. (Completion of potential jokes is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Vurt by Jeff Noon, a personal favorite, is one-fifth the value of IJ. I've made up for that by reading Vurt at least five times by now. Of course, then I noticed that Vurt, by grade, is written for the mentally handicapped. Fuck me. Did I call it a personal favorite? I meant, uh, big words rule, little words drool. Yeah, yeah. The real lit-bloggers are gonna blackball me before I even get started.

Then there's Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegarnder, which only reached the 5.6th grade. I mean, obviously, he had to dumb things down for us Clevelanders. But he also recognized that us Clevelanders got better things to spend our money on and he cut us a deal; 21,000 words on the dollar. What happens to the math if I admit that I only read half the book before I quit, not because the book was bad, but because I liked it too much? And what if I admit that the opening section is still one of my favoritist things ever? How's THAT add up, Mister Fancy Pants Amazon Web Site Thing? Huh? Huh? Where's your concordance now, bitch?!?

I digress. I have to stop this. I've got to get back to Cloud Atlas which I'm loving immensely, enjoying the weird dizzy stay-up-past-bedtime feeling it's giving me. I paid a dollar for each 15,902 word chunk, damm it, and I intend to get my money's worth.