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    Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
    Unavailable
    Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
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    Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
    Audiobook (abridged)3 hours

    Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

    Published by Hachette Audio

    Narrated by Robert Petkoff

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures.

    Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateDec 13, 2005
    ISBN9781594832697
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Consider the Lobster

    4/5

    1,055 ratings41 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This was a great collection of non-fiction. The tone, style, and subject matter varies wildly from piece to piece. They each touch on separate issues with a philosophical basis and the one on McCain and the titular essay are especially poignant and lasting in their effects. It is such a shame what happened to David Foster Wallace, but this is representative of him at his height and is truly some of his best, and most commendable, work.
    • 5/5
      A treasure as an audiobook read by the late author, this is a small collection of his essays, all of which are on uncomfortable topics. DFW asks such probing and (retrospectively) crucial follow up questions to those of the immediate surface concern that it makes you wonder if you've thought deeply enough about the events of our time.
    • 5/5
      I absolutely loved David Foster Wallace's collection of essays in Consider The Lobster. 5 stars.

      I found that all of the essays were amazingly well written and thoughtful. This is top shelf reading period. I wish other nonfiction authors could write with 1/2 the skill that is on display throughout these essays.

      The topics touched on in this volume ranges from the perverse underbelly of the pornography industry to the ethics of boiling a lobster alive to conservative talk radio. My personal favorites were: "Big Red Son", "Authority and American Usage", "Up, Simba" and "Host". "Authority and American Usage" and "Up, Simba" are worth the price of admission by themselves, and the collection contains 10 essays in all.

      I often found myself immersed in the narratives, and it didn't matter if I was particularly fond of the subject - this speaks volumes to the power, depth and thoughtfulness of the writing. I will be definitely reading more of Mr. Wallace in the future.

      Note: The author's use of copious footnotes take a bit to get use to if one is not familiar, but after a few essays the style blends well with the narrative and adds immensely to the overall presentation.

      Do yourself a favor and read these essays. Some of the content is a bit dated, but it's still vastly superior than most contemporary expositions.

      Recommended
    • 4/5
      Liked a few of these essays a lot. Authority and American Usage was my absolute favorite, but the insights provided concerning talk radio in Host, and the behind the scenes look at the McCain campaign in Up Simba were also very interesting. Found some of his other essays somewhat mean and less insightful (particularly the one on Tracy Austin). Wallace is difficult to read in many ways, but I found most of this book worth the struggle.
    • 4/5
      A substantial, chewy read with more footnotes than you could shake a stick at. Seriously, don't read this if you don't like footnotes cos dude there are f'notes on f'notes.

      As a collection of essays, of course the level of interest in the various items will vary. The first essay in particular - Big Red Son - was really not that hot a hit. It hotted up a bit with the next chapter, where Wallace gave John Updike a well-deserved good kicking; but the one I really liked a lot was the chapter on Authority and American Usage - lexicography, language geekery, and both footnotes and endnotes for 60 pages! Yeah ok maybe that won't float your boat but I loved it. Particularly cos it was even about a book published by us, heh heh... All that and the Private Language Argument too! Cor. I nearly expired with geeky happiness.

      Pausing only to give an honourable mention to the chapter on John McCain's entry into the 2000 presidential race - interesting partly because of subsequent events of course - the other chapter that stuck in my mine was the last one, about radio talk-show host John Ziegler. It was full of good analysis of just why noxious right-wing talk show radio has become so popular and such big business; and it also outlined quite what a horrible-sounding so-and-so the talk show host in question actually is. (I looked him up afterwards and his most recent activity has involved being a fervent Sarah Palin supporter, which about says it all.) All that and a mad layout that is a sort of instead-of-footnoting, gone more bonkers than you'd think likely or feasible. But it's fun!
    • 5/5
      rereading in honor of the lobster festival here in rockland, which we just survived again...
    • 4/5
      I probably would have been more open to David Foster Wallace had the book been rearranged. I was offended by the first essay, Big Red Sun.This author is quite amazing. Smart, talented and leaned! I probably wouldn't pick up something by him again, or reccomend this book to a friend, but it was definately informative.
    • 5/5
      The perfect marriage of head and heart. Loopily earnest and self-reflexive with a terrifying capacity to understand and understand: not just brain-straining theories, but - more impressively - people. Feels and writes the world with all nerve endings exposed, at once rawly disappointed at the overall state of meanness and pettiness and inhumanity, but still, somehow, achingly hopeful. Never simple, never reductive, always great.
    • 5/5
      David Foster Wallace is the wittiest writer I've read. I put him right up there with Douglas Adams and H.L. Mencken. His criticisms and observations of contemporary life are a joy to read for anyone who at times feels exasperated by modern society.
    • 4/5
      Dyamic engaging collection of essays on various topics ranging from the annual adult porn industry awards to Kafka's humor to lobsters.
    • 3/5
      For those who have never read Wallace's nonfiction before, this isn't the essay collection to start with. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again has more winners that I read over and over, with the piece on taking a cruise an absolute gem. That book also has accounts of the Illinois State Fair and a top-level tennis tournament. This volume has a visit to the Maine lobster vessel but it doesn't reach the peaks (well, digressions and ruminations) that the earlier volume did. Instead he pretty much settles on mulling over where lobsters feel pain (they seem to) and thus whether we should be eating or cooking then. He would have made a good popular science writer. The funny piece on a porn movie awards show in Las Vegas is really more Wallace's element. Yes, it's as tacky and ridiculous as you might expect, but he also gets the perspective of the addled waiters as the awards dinner, just like he did with Tibor (the Tibster) in the cruise story.The piece of Updike the misogynist makes you wonder why Wallace wasn't given more chances to take on these grand old men. Wouldn't he have been good on Roth and Bellow? Also spot on is the review, from Harper's, of a new Oxford book on American usage. He really zeroes in on the author/editor's premises, whether he's liberal or conservative, yadda yadda. Maybe this only interests copy editors and their fans, but it was a lot more interesting that the review in A Supposedly Fun Thing of some text on deconstructionism or something. Then there was a strange visit to some obscure right-wing talk show host in Southern Calfornia; why would anyone outside the region and time give a damn. Maybe the John McCain profile would have seemed more interesting if I hadn't read Michael Lewis's very similar treatment in a book covering the Dole election (whenever that was). The two writers have the same problem: they know very little about *policy* and have little interest in learning more. They both like and admire McCain and, without thinking very much, assume that;s all readers and voters want or need to know. Lewis went through the whole campaign, so he's the worst offender; he never tried to grasp the platforms of any of the candidates in that race. Well, regardless, we all know all this color stuff about McCain many times over by now; Wallace's piece doesn't age well.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating collection of essays that range in subject from the porn industry to lobsters to political campaigns but never lose their basic faith in humanity or sense of humor and occasional puzzlement about what humanity gets up to. Each essay is carefully set out to provoke a well-thought out response in its readers. And, often, make them laugh as they think about changing some aspect of their lives or the world.
    • 5/5
      For once the hype is deserved. Have to admit I'd never come across him before his death and the first thing I read was a piece in "The Guardian" which impressed me so much I went out and found Lobster. It's especially impressive how he searches out everything there is to know about lobsters and whether they can feel pain without ever preaching for or against eating them. His description of the porn industry and the porn awards show succeeded in making me feel revulsion towards it in a way that any number of feminist authors have failed to do in the past. That's quite some feat.
    • 5/5
      More incandescent prose from one of my favorite essayists. DFW is in fine form throughout, with particularly good pieces on the 'seamy underbelly' of lexicography, John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, a porn convention, a talk radio host, the works of Dostoyevsky, and the eponymous crustaceans. I can never make up my mind: Wallace is famous for his copious use of footnotes and other digressions; is he self-indulgent (i.e. he can't bear to leave out even a single pearl of his wisdom) or is he instead a hyper-considerate, even nervous, writer who's obsessed with avoiding confusion or leaving himself open to misinterpretation? Either way, his style works for me, so I'd highly recommend this volume.
    • 4/5
      I like Wallace's voice, but I ahve to say I was a little turned off by the lengthy first section about the porn industry. It could easily have been half as long and still packed a punch.
    • 4/5
      Wallace is often at his best in essay form and his newest collection is no exception. There's some great stuff here: including "Big Red Son," an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the Adult Video Awards; "Authority and American Usage," which starts as a review of a new dictionary and gradually devolves into not only a comparison between prescriptivist and descriptivist thinking, but an indictment of his own teaching style; "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," in which DFW watches the second plane crash into The World Trade Center from the safety of his neighbor's kitchen; and the title essay, where DFW gets too tied up in the realization that The Maine Lobster Festival amounts to not much more than asking a million people to stand around and watch as one million lobsters are boiled alive to actually write about whether the festival is fun or not.The book has it's problems, obviously. There's a Dostoevsky piece that left me bored and cold. And the footnotes, which don't tend to bother me usually, are quite annoying in "Host" (instead of being at the foot of the page, they're included in little boxes that break up the text--pretty to look at, but difficult to read). But there is something to enjoy or learn in almost all of this collection's entries.For me, though, no matter how good or bad the rest of the book is, the book itself gets four stars solely for the inclusion of "Up, Simba." This essay, originally an e-book, concerning eight day's on the campaign trail with Senator John McCain back in 2000, is one of the most thought-provoking and beautiful pieces of writing that DFW has ever produced.
    • 2/5
      It is very well written but I did not enjoy this at all. While he is witty, this is a pretty sarcastic and darker view of life. I think it just needs to be mentioned in the summary that this touches on a darker type is comedy and not as a funny read at all. Nothing light about it.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant examinations of three very different subjects! I also love David Foster Wallace's idea of changing audio quality as a way to indicate a footnote.
    • 5/5
      What an amazing literary talent! RIP D.F.W.! I’m only discovering your work now, but looking forward to more!
    • 5/5
      Wallace applies his mastery of language to three incredibly interesting subjects and makes the reader as if she or he is in every scene experiencing the events with him.
    • 4/5
      Not the full book I think its about half the book.
    • 5/5
      The audio book's value over the printed version, which has many more essays, is the opportunity to hear David Foster Wallace read his own work. The essays are of course beautifully written but their special quality is the author's ability to be simultaneously objective and subjective in his reactions and descriptions. These are very personal tours given by an expert tour guide.
    • 3/5
      Wallace, of course, has an awesome narrative voice. I love how he writes, but the actual subjects of the essays are pretty meh. With the exception of the 3rd(?) one about adult films and the eponymous one, its just nice prose about mundane topics
    • 3/5
      Variable but mostly interesting. My main complaint is about footnotes: the layout of footnotes in the last essay was hard to follow in several places, and the subfootnote font in the other essays was stupidly tiny. I preferred A Supposedly Fun Thing &c.
    • 4/5
      Some of these essays were a little frustrating. The footnotes thing can seem a little affected and a kind of literary alienation device, but the wit and the humanity tends to make it through regardless.
    • 5/5
      David Foster Wallace's collection of essays. I enjoyed his description of covering John McCain's run for the 2000 Presidency, especially given McCain's current campaign.

      Wallace uses extensive footnotes in his expository writing; the footnotes are almost more entertaining than the main body itself.
    • 5/5
      Dear Jesus, that is best writer I've ever read. I get it. If you have any appreciation of thought and consideration, you need to read this and/or anything you can find by David Foster Wallace.
    • 4/5
      I don't know much about Kafka or Dostoyevsky. I found the American Usage book review stodgy in parts. But this is undeniably a phenomenal set of essays, with DFW showing he wasn't just one of the best authors of his generation, but an equally excellent journalist as well. His pieces on McCain, talk radio and the titular lobster are all masterpieces.
    • 4/5
      Consider the Lobster and Other Essays was an up and down experience for me. This was my first David Foster Wallace book, and it is undeniable that the guy was brilliant. I now know much better what a huge loss his death was. But some of these essays were much more my cuppa than others, and his love of footnotes baffles me.The first essay is his exhausting examination of the Adult Video Awards show, and I couldn't wait for it to end. A tip of the hat for his taking on a subject not often intelligently examined, but the content for me alternated between disgusting and boring, and way too few of the multitudinous footnotes were amusing enough to justify the hard work of reading them. On the other hand, the next essay, ripping an Updike book titled Toward the End of Time, was concise, on target, insightful, and hilarious. For example, after "guessing" that for many oldsters "Updike's evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic", he explains that "today's sub-forties" in age:"many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation . . . have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism, and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than oneself."As you can see, he wasn't shy about making bold pronouncements, and they certainly are thought-provoking.He got me again with his Kafka essay: "For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny." Yes! Kafka is funny; you need to appreciate the absurdity of what you're reading, even when the content is pitch dark. And Wallace's insights into trying to teach Standard Written English to college students, described in an ostensible review of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, are similarly both entertaining and convincing as to their accuracy. Another highlight for me was the title essay, which has him as Gourmet magazine's on-the-spot reporter for the annual Maine Lobster Festival who nonetheless is preoccupied with the question of whether it is "all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure."On the 2000 presidential campaign trail in another essay, he becomes a fan of John McCain as a person while denouncing his "scary" right wing policies. He brings us vividly into McCain's four year's of POW camp suffering, including McCain's refusal, despite his torment, to be preferentially released before other POWs because of family connections: "Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self interest getting knifed in the nuts and having fractures set without a general {anaesthetic} would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was mostly delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100 pounds, and the other POWs were sure he would die . . ." His experience gave McCain a "moral authority"other candidates lacked. McCain was admired by journalists, and many voters, not only for his frankness and honesty, but for being, unlike the other candidates, able to behave "somewhat in the ballpark of a real human being". In the end his extreme views and Bush's successful negative ad campaign likely doomed his political chances.Bibiophiles will enjoy the essay on Dostoevsky, and Wallace's strongly stated belief that "many of the novelists of our own place and time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished, in comparison to Gogol or Dostoyevsky." There's a lot to like in his essay on right wing radio host John Ziegler, too, although I was horrified to see the dreaded footnotes climb up into the text, with boxes and arrows. No!!I was glad I read this for the ups, and for the appreciation I gained of how brilliant this guy was. That brilliance means I'll read more of his work. I can recommend this book strongly, with the caveat that, if you're like me, there are parts you're going to have to tolerate rather than appreciate.
    • 5/5
      This isn't a review of the essays, because they're obviously incredible, but just to say that I listened to this as an audio book on a long car ride and it was such a great experience. I definitely recommend it, whether you've already read this collection or not. I know audio books are a contentious method of "reading" but sometimes they're necessary. There's only so much radio you can listen to in one stretch. It was even read by David Foster Wallace, with a funny work around for the footnotes. He's always amazing, but getting to actually hear him read his work made it all the better. And it made a long, boring car ride much more interesting. So...just think about it.